Nigeria ends 21-day Ebola contact monitoring with no secondary transmission

Nigerian health authorities have completed a 21-day monitoring period for 62 contacts of an Ebola patient, with none developing the disease after the country's first case in over a decade. The patient, a Swiss woman who had traveled to Uganda before returning to Nigeria, was evacuated to Switzerland where she fully recovered and has been discharged from hospital.

Thirteen contacts reported fever or other non-specific symptoms during monitoring, but all tested negative for the virus, according to the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (NCDC). The last contact has now been discharged, marking the end of the initial monitoring period.

Outbreak protocols

However, completing contact monitoring does not by itself mean the outbreak is over. According to World Health Organization (WHO) protocols, a country must complete a full 42-day countdown from the recovery or departure of the last confirmed patient before an official end-of-outbreak declaration can be made.

Ebola is highly contagious and spreads through direct contact with bodily fluids of an infected person or through contact with contaminated materials. The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control and Prevention investigated seven Ebola alerts across five Nigerian states over the past three weeks, but all tested negative.

Regional spread

This latest Ebola outbreak was first identified in Ituri in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in May. Since then, cases have been reported in eight provinces in the DRC, as well as in Uganda, France, Kenya and most recently, Nigeria.

In DRC, the Ebola outbreak is the second-largest on record, having infected more than 11,000 people and killed over 5,000, according to government data. There are currently no approved treatments or vaccines to combat the rare Bundibugyo strain responsible for the ongoing outbreak.