BY Fredrick Nwabufo
The Nigerian nurse who was infected with the Ebola virus died on Tuesday, minister of health, Professor Onyebuchi Chukwu, has said.
Seven new cases have also been confirmed, two days after the minister confirmed that a Nigerian doctor who treated the Liberian-American patient had also caught the virus.
The female nurse, who is yet unnamed, worked at a hospital at Obalende, Lagos.
“Yesterday, 5th August, 2014, the first known Nigerian to die of the EVD was recorded and this was one of the nurses that attended to the Liberian. The other five cases are currently being treated at the isolation ward in Lagos,” the minister said at a media briefing in Abuja.
He said all the Nigerians diagnosed with Ebola were primary contacts of the index case ─ the late Patrick Sawyer.
“The 24/7 emergency operations centre will be fully functional tomorrow. It will be headed by Dr Faisal Shuaibu as the incident manager. He will later today lead a six-man inter-agency team drawn from the National Primary Health Care Development Agency and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to Lagos to complete the setting up of the centre. They will be joined by the other personnel from Lagos state government and the federal hospitals in the Lagos area as well as the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control.
“We are making arrangements to procure isolation tents to quicken the pace of providing isolation wards in all states of the federation and the federal capital territory.
“We are also setting up a special team to provide counselling and psychosocial support to patients, identified contacts and their families,” he said.
The minister reassured Nigerians the government “was working hard to ensure the containment of the outbreak”.
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