Doctor was part of a team that attended to Liberian-American civil servant who collapsed on arrival at Lagos airport last month
Health officials wait to screen passengers at the arrival hall of Lagos airport. Photograph: Sunday Alamba/AP
A doctor who treated Nigeria's first Ebola victim has himself contracted the deadly virus, raising fears that the seven-month-long epidemic in three west African nations could spread in the continent's most populous nation.
The doctor was part of a team that attended to Patrick Sawyer, a 40-year-old Liberian-American civil servant who collapsed on arrival at Lagos airport last month. Sawyer had flown from Liberia's capital, Monrovia, with flight stopovers in nearby Ghana and Togo.
"As at today, one of the doctors that treated the late Mr Sawyer has tested positive to the Ebola virus," the health minister Onyebuchi Chukwu told reporters in the capital, Abuja. Officials said they had identified 70 people with whom Sawyer had been in contact, eight of whom had been transferred to isolation wards in Lagos.
The epidemic has killed 887 people in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia. The three country's leaders held a regional crisis summit in Guinea's capital, Conakry, last week.
The World Health Organisation said the outbreak was moving faster than efforts to control it, and warned that the more people were infected, the greater the risk of the virus evolving into deadlier mutations.
Authorities in Lagos have rapidly rolled out a series of preventive measures, including quarantining the hospital where Sawyer was treated, distributing protective clothing to health workers and screening airport and seaport passengers arriving from at-risk countries.
Information about the virus has been widely broadcast on radio stations, and some traders have begun cashing in with the sale of hand sanitiser branded "Ebola cleansing hand gels". In the downtown business district where Sawyer was treated, a handful of traders could be seen wearing face masks.
On Sunday, health officials visited the church of the "super-pastor" TB Joshua, which attracts 50,000 worshippers weekly. "We asked that the church leadership be aware of the important role they have to play in preventing Ebola from spreading," a member of the delegation told the Guardian. "Also we warned that they do not hold 'healing sessions' as we are concerned Ebola sufferers might travel from outside the country to the church."
Attempts to contain the disease were hampered in Liberia and Sierra Leone as faith healers and crowded churches sheltered Ebola victims whom they claimed to be able to cure. Both countries eventually made such action a crime punishable with jail terms.
Passed on through contact with bodily fluids of infected patients, surfaces and bush meat, Ebola has no known cure, although chances of survival improve dramatically with early detection and treatment. It is contagious only once symptoms begin showing and can rapidly degenerate into external and internal bleeding.
The epidemic is already having an impact on Nigeria. A South Korean university banned three Nigerian students from attending a summit, and a Nigerian delegation attending a US-Africa summit is believed to have been screened on arrival in Washington.
Elsewhere, health workers and officials said they had been overwhelmed by the spiralling death toll amid a shortage of resources. The medical charity Medecins Sans Frontiers said there were critical gaps in tackling the epidemic.
"The current response to the Ebola outbreak is entirely insufficient compared to the needs, and there needs to be greater mobilisation on the ground. MSF does not have a clear overview of the most affected areas and it is believed that people are still dying in their villages without access to medical care," the organisation said on Friday.
The US said it was sending a team of 50 specialists to the region this week. The British Red Cross has launched an appeal to raise funds. The WHO has set up a $100m (£60m) fund to boost a regional emergency response.
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