It all started at the beginning of August, when a diplomat in Lagos violated a quarantine order and fled to Port Harcourt. That man infected a doctor at the port city, who then had contact with more than 200 people, the World Health Organization said Wednesday. About 60 people had what WHO calls "high-risk exposure" — they were in direct contact with the doctor or his bodily fluids.
The doctor secretly treated the diplomat in a Port Harcourt hotel room. The diplomat reportedly has survived.
The doctor developed symptoms — and thus became contagious to others — on Aug. 11. But for the next two days, he continued to treat patients in his private clinic, performing surgery on two.
As his Ebola symptoms worsened, but before he went into the hospital, the doctor had
"numerous contacts" with relatives and friends who came to his home to celebrate the birth of a baby, the WHO said.
After he was hospitalized, the doctor was treated by the majority of the staff at the hospital's clinic over a six-day period, plus doctors at an outside ultrasound clinic. He also had contact with many members of his church, who visited to perform a healing ritual "said to involve the laying-on of hands," the WHO reports.
The doctor died on Aug. 22. His wife got Ebola but has survived. On Thursday the Nigerian Federal Ministry of Health reported that the doctor's sister has Ebola.
The WHO currently reports 21 cases of Ebola and seven deaths in Nigeria. According to Nigerian Health Minister Onyebuchi Chukwu, five of these cases — two of whom have died — are in the Port Harcourt cluster.
--- via The NPR
