After the shocks and alarms of last week, a bit of good news on Ebola.
First, the World Health Organization has declared Nigeria Ebola-free, after six weeks elapsed without any new cases in the country being reported.
That’s important because it suggests that the disease has been stopped in Africa’s most populous country. As Nigeria also has more direct international flights with the rest of the world, the containment of the virus there sharply reduces the number of possible channels by which the virus could spread beyond the three countries it has hit hardest–Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea.
The announcement will be a big boost to morale among the world’s heath authorities, proof that the disease can be contained by proper medical procedures, after the lapses in protocol in the U.S. and Spain that allowed the virus to infect health care workers there.
“It’s possible to control Ebola. It’s possible to defeat Ebola. We’ve seen it here in Nigeria,” Nigerian Minister of Health Onyebuchi Chukwu told TIME. “If any cases emerge in the future, it will be considered—by international standards—a separate outbreak. If that happens, Nigeria will be ready and able to confront it exactly as we have done with this outbreak.”
For the WHO to declare Nigeria as Ebola-free, the country had to make it 42 days with no new cases (double the incubation period), verify that it actively sought out all possible contacts, and show negative test results for any suspected cases.
Nigeria had 20 cases of Ebola after a Liberian-American man named Patrick Sawyer flew into Lagos and collapsed at the airport. Health care workers treating Sawyer were infected, and as it spread it ultimately killed eight people, a low number next to the thousands of cases and deaths in other countries. Nigeria’s health system is considered more robust, but there was significant concern among experts that a case would pop up in one of the country’s dense-populated slums and catch fire.
Fears that the virus was still spreading in Nigeria had been behind an incident on Thursday, when a passenger who had originally flown from Lagos was taken ill with signs of fever on an Air France flight to Madrid.
However, that passenger has now tested negative for the virus, media report the Spanish Health Ministry as saying.
In addition, Teresa Romero, the Spanish nurse who became the first person to contract the disease in Europe after treating a patient repatriated from west Africa, has now twice tested negative for the virus, and is considered to be recovering.
“She now has no virus and we’re waiting for the second result,” Teresa Mesa, a spokeswoman for Romero’s family, told Spanish TV Sunday. in televised comments late yesterday. “I’ve spoken to her and she’s in great form.”
Elsewhere, AFP reported Monday that some Air France staff have refused to work on flights to Nigeria, Guinea and Sierra Leone (the airline doesn’t fly to Liberia) due to concerns about catching the virus. It quoted a spokesman for the company as saying that it was able to operate its flights as normal, however.
