Update: Ebola outbreak may be over in Nigeria and Senegal--CDC

Update

New York Times           Sept. 30, 2024

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr

Lagos --With quick and coordinated action by some of its top doctors, Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, appears to have contained its first Ebola outbreak, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday.

As the epidemic rages out of control in three nations only a few hundred miles away, Nigeria is the only country to have beaten back an outbreak with the potential to harm many victims in a city with vast, teeming slums.

“For those who say it’s hopeless, this is an antidote — you can control Ebola,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, director of the C.D.C.   ....

While the danger in Nigeria is not over, the health minister, Dr. Onyebuchi Chukwu, said in a telephone interview that his country was now better prepared, with six laboratories able to make diagnoses and response teams and isolation wards ready in every major state.

The success was in part the result of an emergency command center financed in 2012 by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to fight polio. As soon as the outbreak began, it was turned into the Ebola Emergency Operations Center.

See full story

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/01/health/ebola-outbreak-in-nigeria-appears-to-be-over.html?_r=0

Earlier report

USA TODAY 12:17 p.m. EDT September 30, 2014

by Liz Sazbo

The Ebola outbreak may be over in two countries -- Nigeria and Senegal -- even as it continues to spread rapidly elsewhere in West Africa, U.S. health officials said Tuesday.

No new Ebola cases have been diagnosed in Nigeria since Aug. 31, suggesting that the outbreak has been contained, according to a report Tuesday from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The only case confirmed in Senegal was reported Aug. 28 in a man who survived.

Ebola has infected 6,553 people and has killed 3,083 in the three countries hit hardest by the epidemic — Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia — the World Health Organization says. The number of cases has been doubling every three weeks, and the CDC estimates that the disease could affect up to 1.4 million people by January if it's not quickly put under control.

The Ebola epidemic took a different course in Nigeria from the beginning, and it affected how the world responded to the outbreak.

....

Nigeria's swift and organized response to Ebola stands in contrast to the disorganized response seen in the countries hit hardest. The outbreak most likely began in December in Guinea, but doctors there didn't recognize that the growing number of sick people were sick with Ebola until March, after dozens of people had been infected. The disease then spread to neighboring states in areas with a lot of cross-border traffic.

Link to full story

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/09/30/ebola-over-in-nigeria/16473339/