THE Nigerian nurse, infected with the Ebola virus, has died, just as seven fresh cases of infection have been confirmed, the Minister of Health, Professor Onyebuchi Chukwu, reveals.
The female nurse, who was working at an Obalende hospital in Lagos, reportedly gave up the ghost on Tuesday.
“Yesterday, 5th August, 2014, the first known Nigerian to die of the EVD was recorded and this was one of the nurses that attended to the Liberian. The other five cases are currently being treated at the isolation ward in Lagos,” the minister said at a media briefing Wednesday in Abuja, adding that all the Nigerians diagnosed with the virus were primary contacts of the index case ─ the late Patrick Sawyer.
“The 24/7 emergency operations centre will be fully functional tomorrow (Thursday). It will be headed by Dr Faisal Shuaibu as the incident manager. He will later today (Wednesday)lead a six-man inter-agency team drawn from the National Primary Health Care Development Agency and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to Lagos to complete the setting up of the centre. They will be joined by the other personnel from the Lagos State government and the federal hospitals in the Lagos area as well as the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control, the minister stated.
Chukwu continued: “We are making arrangements to procure isolation tents to quicken the pace of providing isolation wards in all states of the federation and the federal capital territory.
“We are also setting up a special team to provide counselling and psychosocial support to patients, identified contacts and their families,” he added.
He however, reassured the citizenry of government efforts at checking the epidemic, saying “ government was working hard to ensure the containment of the outbreak”.
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