The widow of Iyke Enemuo, the doctor who died from Ebola in Nigeria’s oil city of Port Harcourt has also tested positive to the virus, the state government said on Sunday. Sampson Parker, the Rivers State Health Commissioner while briefing newsmen on Sunday said test results showed the woman had the disease, which claimed the life of her husband on August 22.
Enemuo fell ill and died after treating an official from the ECOWAS regional bloc who travelled to Port Harcourt after having contact with Patrick Sawyer, a Liberian man who brought the disease into Nigeria.
The doctor was the sixth to die from the virus in Nigeria and the first outside Lagos. Sampson said three persons – a doctor, a pharmacist and a woman who had contact with Enemuo at the hospital where he died- have been taken to a specialist treatment centre outside the city.
He also stated that the doctor’s widow has been transferred to an isolation unit in Lagos.
While speaking at a news conference, Sampson said, “some 200 primary and secondary contacts have been traced, although about 60 had yet to be spoken to”, adding that “we are concentrating on the names we have to capture in our (monitoring) activities but the good news is that we have been making good progress in checking the spread of Ebola.”
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