Nigeria has recorded its first confirmed Ebola infection, a development that pushed the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to schedule an extraordinary virtual meeting for October 28 to coordinate the continental response, according to Breitbart News.
Africa CDC director Dr. Jean Kaseya said the gathering is meant to “strengthen our collective response” to the Ebola Bundibugyo outbreak, which was officially declared in May in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Health experts suspect the virus was circulating earlier than that, with infections that were never reported or formally confirmed.
“Ebola is now affecting three regions of Africa. The situation demands urgent action and political leadership at the highest level,” Kaseya said, calling the Bundibugyo outbreak “the most geographically extensive in history.”
How the Nigerian case surfaced
Nigerian officials said the confirmed case is a foreign national who arrived in the country on October 5. She was initially diagnosed with malaria on October 11, but when she failed to respond to treatment, her doctors ordered an Ebola test. The result came back positive on October 19.
The Bundibugyo strain is particularly hard to catch. Test kits built for the more common Ebola strains do not detect it, and routine temperature checks at ports of entry can miss an infected traveler who has been taking over-the-counter fever medication.
Odianosen Ehiakhamen, an assistant director at the Nigeria Center for Disease Control, said Tuesday that 44 contacts have been traced, a group that includes health care workers and the patient’s husband. The BBC reported that the husband is a Swiss national living in Abuja and described him as a diplomat.
Nigerian health authorities are also tracking passengers and crew who flew with the patient on Ethiopian Airlines, though officials said they do not believe she was symptomatic during her flights.
Abuja or Kampala? A dispute over where infection happened
A senior Nigerian public health official told reporters Tuesday that the patient is a resident of Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, and was “originally from Uganda.” The official suggested she may have contracted the disease during a recent “quick travel to Uganda.”
Nigerian Health Minister Ali Muhammad Pate said his agency “presumed” the infection “was likely picked up in Uganda.”
Uganda’s health ministry pushed back sharply. In a statement issued Tuesday, the ministry said the patient merely “transited through Uganda” and that there is no evidence she caught the virus on Ugandan soil.
The ministry noted that the World Health Organization declared Uganda Ebola-free in August, and that while the country recorded roughly 20 infections early in the outbreak, no new cases have been reported since June. WHO protocols require 42 days without a reported infection before a country can be certified free of the disease; the Ebola incubation period runs from 2 to 21 days.
“We wish to clarify that, as at the time of this statement, Uganda has no confirmed active Ebola cases,” the ministry said. “Travel through Uganda does not establish that infection occurred here. The location of exposure remains under investigation.”
The statement also prodded Abuja for more detail: “The government of Nigeria is yet to provide detailed information on her travel itinerary and clinical history, which will guide further investigations and any necessary contact tracing.”
Uganda’s sensitivity has another dimension. The Bundibugyo strain takes its name from the Ugandan town where it was first detected in 2007, though no infections have been reported near Bundibugyo during the current outbreak.
Kenya adds a case; DRC spread widens
Kenya confirmed another Ebola infection on Sunday, bringing its known total to eight. Dr. Patrick Amoth, director of the Kenyan Health Ministry, said in a television interview that 38 people were tested that day and one came back positive: a 49-year-old man who is not a health care worker and who developed fever, headache and muscle pain.
Amoth later said the man’s job involved cleaning utensils and linen for Ebola patients, and that he may have been infected while caring for Kenya’s first confirmed patient of this outbreak, who died on October 5.
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the health ministry reported two cases in Nord-Ubangi, a province on the border with the Central African Republic that had previously been untouched by the outbreak. Ebola has now been detected in eight of the DRC’s provinces. More than 9,400 infections have been reported since mid-May, with over 4,500 deaths.
“We see pockets of Ebola generally going down, but unfortunately geographically it’s spreading out,” said Mohamed Yakub Janabi, the WHO’s regional director for Africa.
Source: www.breitbart.com — https://www.breitbart.com/africa/2026/10/21/nigeria-confirms-ebola-infection-africa-cdc-calls-crisis-summit/