TheCable

By every definition and in every imagination, Dr Stella Ameyo Adadevoh, who succumbed to Ebola on Tuesday, was a national hero. As it were, she died so that thousands of Nigerians might live.

The consultant physician at the First Consultant Hospital, Lagos, attended to Patrick Sawyer, the Liberian-American who came to Nigeria having evidently known, as it turned out, that he had a suspected case of Ebola which was ravaging Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone.

In trying to save a life, Adadevoh got infected, obviously discovering too late that Sawyer was carrying the deadly virus.

Indisputably, Adadevoh ─ whom her patients have been describing in affectionate terms ─ saved many Nigerians from a certain catastrophe.

It was reported that Sawyer insisted on being discharged from the hospital ostensibly to attend an ECOWAS meeting in Calabar, Cross River State ─ although every evidence now suggests that his real motive was to seek help elsewhere. The ECOWAS meeting was just a decoy, it would appear.

Had Adadevoh discharged Sawyer according to his wish, he would certainly have infected more Nigerians at the Calabar meeting, if he had managed to make it to the venue. He could have infected more people at the airport, on his local flight, in the hotel and at the meeting. The ensuing calamity is unimaginable.

Worse still, if it is true that he wanted to visit a religious house somewhere in Lagos to seek spiritual healing, Sawyer would have transmitted the deadly virus to more Nigerians with the multiplier effect. The pastor and members of his congregation could have been infected.

It would have been practically impossible to identify how many primary and secondary contacts needed to be quarantined. There would have been widespread panic and commotion across the country.

And if it is true that he was planning to travel to the US, via Lagos, to seek medical help ─ direct flights from the States to Liberia having been stopped following the Ebola outbreak ─ then he could have taken the infection to America and caused a more global outbreak.

That the case was limited to only the hospital that treated him is a form of sacrifice that saved the lives of many more Nigerians ─ and Dr. Adadevoh deserves nothing but a posthumous national recognition for keeping Sawyer at the hospital instead.

We call on the federal government to immortalise her in any way possible, including naming a monument after her and endowing a special medical research into infectious diseases in her memory.

The nurses and other medical personnel who died as a result of this unfortunate case must also be honoured, and the families left behind must be helped so that they do not have to suffer further ─ after the loss of their loved ones and, in some cases, bread winners.

We also suggest that there should be some compensation for the hospital which has suffered economic losses as a result of what many Nigerians now regard as an act of “medical terrorism” by Sawyer.

By doing this ─ and we suggest it should be done immediately ─ the federal government would be sending a message to Nigerians that their labour shall never be in vain ─ as a line in the national anthem says.