Nigeria has passed an important milestone in its Ebola response. The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (NCDC) said on Friday that all 62 people identified as contacts of the country’s only confirmed Ebola patient have completed the 21-day monitoring period, and none of them developed the disease.
The NCDC Director-General, Dr Jide Idris, announced the result in Abuja, saying the last contact had been discharged from monitoring that day. He was careful, however, to stress that Nigeria has not yet been declared Ebola-free.
What the NCDC announced
According to Reuters, Leadership and the Nigerian Tribune, the agency said none of the 62 contacts tested positive or fell ill with Ebola during the observation period. Thirteen of them did report fever or other general symptoms at some point, but all 13 tested negative for the virus, Reuters reported.
The NCDC also said it had investigated seven separate Ebola alerts in five states over the past three weeks, and every one of them came back negative. Contact tracing covered hospitals, homes and other places the patient had been, while infection prevention measures were tightened in health facilities in the Federal Capital Territory and elsewhere.
Twenty-one days is the maximum incubation period for Ebola, so a contact who stays well for that long after their last exposure is considered to be out of danger.
How the case reached Nigeria
Nigeria confirmed its first Ebola case in more than a decade in late October. The patient was a Swiss woman who had travelled to Uganda before returning to Nigeria, where she fell ill in Abuja. TVC News reported that the infection was caused by the Bundibugyo strain, the type of Ebola behind the large outbreak in DR Congo.
She and her husband were later evacuated to Switzerland, where, according to Reuters, she made a full recovery and has since been discharged from hospital. The case triggered tracing of everyone she had been in contact with and led the government to put hospitals across the country on alert.
Why it is not over yet
Dr Idris warned against treating the end of contact monitoring as an all-clear. Under World Health Organization rules, a country can only declare an Ebola outbreak over after a 42-day period (twice the incubation period) has passed since the last confirmed patient recovered or left the country, with no new cases in that time.
Until then, the NCDC said its National Emergency Operations Centre remains activated, with its incident management system still at Level 3, the highest response level for Ebola. Idris said Nigeria would stay vigilant because Ebola is still spreading in DR Congo, and there are frequent travel links between Nigeria and East and Central Africa.
Advice to the public
The agency urged Nigerians to avoid unprotected contact with the blood or other body fluids of anyone suspected of having Ebola or any other infectious disease. Health workers have been asked to keep using protective equipment and to report suspected cases quickly. Private hospitals and clinics can reach the NCDC through its emergency line whenever they suspect an outbreak, officials said.
What happens next
If no new case is recorded, the formal 42-day countdown should lead to an official end-of-outbreak declaration in the coming weeks. Officials had earlier pointed to early December as a possible date for that announcement.
For now, the result is being welcomed as a sign that Nigeria’s surveillance system, built up after the 2014 Ebola scare and strengthened during COVID-19, did its job: the virus was detected, contacts were found and isolated, and there was no local spread. Health experts will still be watching airports, border crossings and hospitals closely while the regional outbreak continues.
Sources: Reuters, Leadership, Nigerian Tribune, TVC News.
