Swiss Ebola patient arrives in Geneva after evacuation from Nigeria

The Ugandan-born wife of a Swiss diplomat was medically evacuated from Abuja to Switzerland on Monday after testing positive for Ebola, Swiss authorities said. She is receiving care at Geneva University Hospitals after being diagnosed with the Bundibugyo strain, while her husband, a close contact with no symptoms, is in isolation at University Hospital Zurich. Swiss officials said the case presents no public health risk to Switzerland.

Nigeria’s health minister, Muhammad Ali Pate, said the woman was “stable, conscious, communicating” and that her test results were reverting towards baseline. The evacuation left Nigeria with no Ebola cases, WHO Africa director Mohamed Janabi said, adding that Nigerian teams had stabilized the patient through the acute phase of the illness. Nigeria continues to monitor 52 people who had contact with the woman. Pate said authorities were keeping containment measures in force and asked Nigerians to stay alert.

How the woman contracted the virus remains unresolved. Nigerian authorities said Friday they had not established how she became infected. The Associated Press said Switzerland’s foreign ministry reported she had not visited the Democratic Republic of Congo and was thought to have caught the virus while travelling in Uganda. Africa CDC director-general Jean Kaseya told Reuters that investigators would go to Nigeria; he said travel records show she never entered Congo, which conflicts with accounts from Ugandan officials. Ugandan officials say she spent a two-week holiday there before returning to Abuja, raising concern about undetected transmission.

Reuters reported that the Bundibugyo strain has caused more than 4,800 deaths and almost 10,000 cases in Congo since the outbreak began, and no vaccines or treatments for it are approved. In Congo, a nurse was killed and another health worker severely injured in an attack in Bafwasende, Tshopo province, on Saturday, the World Health Organization said. WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus condemned the attack and said health workers must be able to work in dignity and safety, and that healthcare must be protected.

In Kenya, the first group of 20 people who had contact with the country’s index Ebola patient completed 21 days of monitoring without developing symptoms and were released on Monday, according to Kenya’s health ministry. Kenya has had nine cases and two deaths, and all of them trace to a man who entered from Congo via Uganda’s Entebbe airport. Another 98 contacts remain in quarantine and will be released in four waves beginning November 3. Uganda reported 20 cases in May and June but none since; WHO declared it free of the virus in August. The outbreak has now reached East, Central and West Africa, making its geographic spread wider than any prior Ebola outbreak on the continent.