The Guinean student’s route to Dakar is potentially even more threatening, involving a cross-country journey of more than 1,000 km (600 miles) from Forecariah in southwestern Guinea, near the Sierra Leone border.
Ebola, which has proven fatal in around half the cases in the current outbreak, is spread through the body fluids of the ill. It is not clear if the student was already contagious on the road, in which case there could be many other undiscovered contacts.
“The bad news is that he was here for too many days with a high number of exposures,” said Jorge Castilla-Echenique, an epidemiologist at the European Commission’s Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection Department in Dakar. “The good news is that in a survivor the risk (of contagion) tends to be lower than in someone who dies.”
It is not clear why the young man, a third-year student at Conakry University on his summer break, traveled to Senegal, a country his housemate said he had never previously visited.
Guinean health ministry sources say that after he left Forecariah, an “active hub” of the disease, he passed through several unaffected districts on his way to the border. In a stroke of bad luck, Senegal closed the frontier on Aug. 21, a few days after the student crossed it.
“We’re trying to trace the student’s itinerary. We know that he left Guinea and did one stopover and changed vehicle,” Doctor Mamadou Ndiaye, director of prevention in Senegal, told Reuters.
In interviews with officials, the young man was reluctant to give them his exact itinerary and details of people he had met, said one diplomat briefed by authorities. It is not clear why the young man was unwilling to cooperate.
Ndiaye said the student traveled by ‘bush taxi’ – typically, old Peugeot 504 estate cars transporting seven passengers jammed together for hours, sweating in the heat.
An initial test of the student by Senegalese doctors came out negative, a diplomat said. But a second test, revealed to ministry officials in the early hours of Aug. 29, was positive and health minister Seck announced it that morning.
Yet even the day after the announcement, a Reuters witness at the house said there was no surveillance in place. Neighbors say a young woman slipped away under cover of darkness last week, though a police officer monitoring the site denied this.
Though his health has improved, the student still tested positive for the virus in a check up on Sept. 3 and he remains in isolation.
“People should know that if it were not for this boy’s state of health, he would be before the courts,” Senegalese President Macky Sall told state television. “You cannot be a carrier of sickness and take it to other countries.”
On the streets of Dakar, locals are angry at the student for bringing Ebola to Senegal. Some vent their frustration on the Guinean community, many of them shopkeepers like the student’s uncle, running stalls selling items like sugar and soft drinks.
“There was no Ebola in Senegal. It was a Guinean and we should have killed him,” said Talla Dieye, who runs a small coffee stand in the Parcelles neighborhood. (Reuters)[eap_ad_3]
