Airport Encounter May Have Spread Ebola to 2 Countries

The first Ebola patients confirmed in Kenya and Nigeria might have crossed paths at an airport in Uganda earlier this month, African health officials said Thursday as they race to trace and slow an outbreak that has spread to several countries. Both patients are known to have traveled through Uganda's Entebbe International Airport on Oct. 3, said Dr. Wessam Mankoula, head of emergency preparedness and response at the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "One of the issues we are currently investigating has been some sort of interaction between the two cases at the airport," Mankoula said.

Nigerian Health Minister Muhammed Pate said Nigeria's case remains contained and that contact-tracing is in progress, the AP reports. "We are trying to contain it so it doesn't go out to the communities. Hopefully, it won't get to that and we are working hard to ensure that," Pate said. The current Ebola outbreak emerged in Congo in May and the disease has since been detected in three other African countries, becoming the continent's most geographically widespread Ebola outbreak in history.

• Nigeria announced its first case of the disease in around a decade on Tuesday, saying the patient had traveled from Uganda. Ugandan authorities denied the claim that the patient was exposed in their country and said the patient had traveled to Congo—something now disputed by health officials.

• The Nigerian patient, the Uganda-born wife of a Swiss diplomat in Abuja, vacationed in Uganda for two weeks in September and returned to Nigeria in early October, officials said. Nigeria said it is currently tracing 44 contacts, mostly healthcare workers. Mankoula said additional contacts have been identified, but declined to give the new figure. Reuters reports that authorities are tracing people who were on the same Ethiopian Airlines flight from Uganda, but they do not believe she was symptomatic while flying.
• Uganda recorded 20 cases before declaring itself free of the disease in June. However, the country is now believed to be linked to the new imported cases in Nigeria and Kenya. Kenya has recorded nine cases so far, linked to a traveler who had returned from Congo to Kenya through Uganda. Congo has been struggling to contain the virus, which has infected more than 9,500 people, killing nearly half of them.