It was on Wednesday that Kenya's Health Minister Aden Duale announced that a 40-year-old Kenyan man who had returned home from the Democratic Republic of Congo had died of Ebola.
The man died on Monday evening, October 5, two days after he landed at Nairobi airport. The information that is now coming to light about his journey as a severely ill person with Ebola raises fears that he may have become a "super spreader" of the virus.
The 40-year-old Kenyan had lived and worked as a businessman in Congo for seven years and is believed to have been infected in August. At the time, he was outside the town of Bondo in the province of Bas-Uele, a full 80 kilometers from the epicenter of the outbreak in the province of Ituri.
There he sought care at several facilities in three different cities before flying to the million-dollar city of Kisangani, and then on to Beni, which is close to the border with Uganda.
At present, only goods transport and strictly necessary passenger travel are allowed across the border to Uganda, and the people who pass must be screened with fever thermometers. But he apparently managed to get through and from there travel to the capital Kampala and Entebbe International Airport.
He made the entire trip in a seriously ill condition. When he arrived at the hospital in Nairobi, driven by relatives who had picked him up at the airport, he had all the known symptoms of Ebola hemorrhagic fever:
- He suffered from fever, joint pain, bleeding and a sore throat when he arrived, says Africa CDC's epidemiologist Wessam Mankoula at a digital press conference on Thursday.
Kenyan authorities are now monitoring ten relatives of the deceased, 21 health workers and 23 passengers who were on the plane, according to the UN news service. How many people the man crowded into the queues for passport control is unclear. A Kenyan reporter participating in the press conference points out to the Africa CDC that the health control at Nairobi's airport was unmanned as recently as Wednesday, after the Ebola case became known.
The big question is how many people he came into contact with during his three-day journey through Uganda, with two overnight stays.
- They are currently working in Uganda to identify these contacts he may have had, and do contact tracing. What we know now is different to what we knew two days ago and it will be like that in the future as well, we are constantly getting more information, says Wessam Mankoula to DN.
At the end of August, Uganda could celebrate that 42 days had passed since the last of a handful of Ebola patients had been declared healthy. 42 days corresponds to double the incubation period and Uganda was therefore declared Ebola-free. But now the counter is reset to zero again.
If the concern in the neighboring countries is great that the virus will take hold through imported cases, the situation is completely different in the Congo where it is raging like a forest fire. Since the outbreak was confirmed in mid-May, more than 8,700 people have been infected and nearly half of these, roughly 4,200, have died. That makes the outbreak Congo's worst ever.
The worst Ebola outbreak in the world to date took place in West Africa 12 years ago. In total, more than 11,000 people died in three countries. What now worries the experts is the following: The ongoing outbreak in Congo has grown four times as fast and claimed four times more lives than at the corresponding stage, 21 weeks into the epidemic, in West Africa. With the same spread continuing, Congo's Ebola epidemic could thus become far more deadly, if nothing is done.
There are positive signs that the number of new cases has started to drop sharply, by up to 25 percent, in a majority of the affected provinces. Wessam Mankoula says the figures must be viewed with some caution for several reasons. Social unrest and strikes affect information gathering and the number of tested and traced contacts is still far too low.
Even if the epidemic is not growing as fast, Mankoula wants to see more patients in the hospitals.
- According to our calculations, up to 60 percent of the victims still die in the homes. There are far too many, and many could have survived if they had sought proper care, he says.
