The state Commissioner for Special Duties, Dr Wale Ahmed, assured Lagos residents that eight people who had been cleared were discharged after satisfying standard procedure of such exercise.
He said that re-infection might not be completely ruled out in all patients, lamenting that some of the discharged patients had not been seen in the public for fear of stigmatisation. He added that plans were on the way to bring the survivors to the public, to celebrate them “for all of you to see that they are not dangerous.”
“The Ebola virus disease is not resident here. It has a reservoir in fruit bats and in corpses. The reservoir of infection is in corpses of somebody who died of it and in those bats. Because it resides in corpses, that is why we traced those corpses specially,” Ahmed said.
In line with the World Health Organisation protocol, the body of Enemuo , who is the first Ebola fatality case in Rivers State and others considered to be high-risk bodies in the University of Port Harcourt Teaching Hospital mortuary are to be buried this week in Port Harcourt under the supervision of Ministry of Health officials and WHO.
The Rivers State Commissioner of Health, Sampson Parker, revealed yesterday that an elderly woman who had been quarantined at Ebola isolation centre at Oduoha because she shared the same ward with Enemuo when he was ill and receiving treatment at the Good Heart Hospital, Port Harcourt had tested positive for the Ebola virus.
He also disclosed that a doctor and pharmacist who once worked with late Enemuo at Samsteel Hospital, Port Harcourt, tested negative for the Ebola virus and had been discharged from the quarantine centre.
Parker explained that irrespective of the fact that the doctor and pharmacist tested negative, health officials had placed them under surveillance. He stated that health officials still intended to conduct another round of test on them because they were still within the 21 days’ circle of the Ebola virus.
Enemuo’s sister who resided with him until his demise penultimate Friday, was said to have become symptomic and had been quarantined after she returned from Aba, Abia State. (The Guardian)
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