LAGOS, Nigeria — The first Ebola patients confirmed in Kenya and Nigeria might have crossed paths at an airport in Uganda earlier this month, African health officials said Thursday as they race to trace and slow an outbreak that has spread to several African countries.
Both patients are known to have traveled through Uganda’s Entebbe International Airport on Oct. 3, said Dr. Wessam Mankoula, head of emergency preparedness and response at the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“One of the issues we are currently investigating has been some sort of interaction between the two cases at the airport,” Mankoula said.
The current Ebola outbreak emerged in Congo in May and the disease has since been detected in three other African countries, becoming the continent’s most geographically widespread Ebola outbreak in history.
Nigeria announced its first case on Tuesday, saying the patient had travelled from Uganda. Ugandan authorities denied the claim that the patient was exposed in their country and said the patient had travelled to Congo — something now disputed by health officials.
The Nigerian case, who is a Uganda-born wife of a diplomat in Abuja, had vacationed in Uganda for two weeks in September and had arrived in Nigeria in early October, officials said. Nigeria said it is currently tracing 44 contacts. Mankoula said additional contacts have been identified, but declined to give the new figure.
Uganda recorded 20 cases before declaring itself free of the disease in June. However, the country is now believed to be linked to the new imported cases in Nigeria and Kenya. Kenya has recorded nine cases so far, linked to a traveler who had returned from Congo to Kenya through Uganda.
So far there is no indication that the Nigerian patient traveled to Congo, Mankoula said. Officials from the World Health Organization said the same thing at a separate briefing on Thursday.
“The information supplied to WHO did not include travel to another country during that period, and other accounts about prior travels were not communicated to us,” said Dr. Pavel Ursu, the WHO country representative in Nigeria.
Congo has been struggling to contain the virus, which has infected more than 9,500 people, killing nearly half of them. The virus has spread to eight provinces and 66 health zones across the country’s eastern region.
According to data from the Africa CDC, only 20% of confirmed cases are among known contacts and about 60% of deaths are within the community, outside of treatment centers. Analysts say the disease in some of the hotspots in Congo is out of control.
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