Two people who flew through several African countries have taken the Ebola virus to new places, and fears are great that the spread of infection will now take off in countries with limited experience of the dreaded disease. The cases may be linked to each other, as the affected people were simultaneously waiting for different flights at the airport outside Uganda's capital, Kampala.
Nigeria fears a nightmare scenario after a 42-year-old woman was allegedly wrongly treated for malaria at several clinics in the capital Abuja for 13 days before being tested for Ebola, which was confirmed on Tuesday. With 240 million inhabitants, Nigeria is the largest country in Africa and in just three months will go to presidential and parliamentary elections, something that is usually a process characterized by political unrest.
The woman is married to a European diplomat in Nigeria and had been on holiday for two weeks in her native Uganda before she fell ill. At the moment, Nigerian authorities have only identified about 40 contacts that the woman has had, but the real number is likely to be much higher.
Where was she infected? Ugandan authorities have claimed that she traveled to Congo while in Uganda, but have been unable to substantiate this claim. Pride ran high in the Ugandan government when the country was declared Ebola-free in August, 42 days after the last of a handful of infected people was declared healthy.
New spread of infection detected in Uganda could threaten the important high season for tourism around Christmas and New Year. Tourism revenue is especially important after last season's European summer break basically burned down due to the Ebola threat.
The only known case of Ebola in Uganda since August is the 40-year-old Kenyan who traveled from Congo via Uganda to Kenya in a seriously ill condition, where he died two days after arrival.
"The trip through Uganda does not establish that the infection (of the Nigerian woman) took place here," writes Uganda's Ministry of Health in a statement, according to Reuters.
The Kenyan managed to infect at least eight people in the Kenyan capital Nairobi before he died. Those affected are all relatives who helped him from the airport or staff who cared for him in the hospital.
- All cases belong to the same cluster, and to date there is no evidence of spread outside this cluster, said Kenya's Health Minister Patrick Amoth on Tuesday, according to Al Jazeera.
But did the 40-year-old also infect the Ugandan woman? The two flew almost simultaneously from Entebbe International Airport south of Kampala.
The Kenyan left Entebbe on regional low-cost carrier Jambojet, which took off for Nairobi at 11:43 a.m. (local time) on October 3, according to Flightradar24.
The Ugandan flew with Ethiopian Airlines to Addis Ababa, where she changed flights for further travel to Abuja. The plane to Addis Ababa took off at 12:30 but was scheduled to take off 20 minutes earlier, at 12:10. Just under half an hour after the Kenyan's flight.
So they may well have arrived at the airport almost simultaneously to go through check-in, passport and security and then on to the international terminal, which has only a few gates and a single restaurant. When DN left Uganda in June, temperature checks were carried out at the airport, but this was when the country knew that it had received Ebola cases from neighboring Congo.
- One of the questions we are currently investigating is whether there was any kind of interaction between the two cases at the airport, epidemiologist Wessam Mankoula said at the Africa CDC's digital press briefing on Thursday afternoon.
The Ebola outbreak has its epicenter in eastern Congo and is the second largest ever after the large outbreak in West Africa 12 years ago.
