Fresh facts emerged yesterday regarding the travel itinerary of the confirmed Ebola virus patient in the Federal Capital Territory, FCT, revealing that the index case entered Nigeria aboard an Ethiopian Airlines flight earlier this month.
A highly-placed aviation official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, as she was not authorised to brief the media on the matter, told Vanguard that the patient arrived in the country on October 3, 2026.
This came on a day an emergency meeting of officials of the health ministry revealed the index case detected in the country carried the Bundibugyo strain of the virus which, according to the World Health Organisation, WHO, has no vaccine or specific treatment.
This is even as the Ugandan government asked Nigeria to provide detailed travel and clinical records of the woman, the index case, insisting she didn’t pick the virus in its territory, since there is no Ebola case in Uganda.Buy Maps
Meanwhile, the two arms of the National Assembly, Senate and House of Representatives, have asked the Federal Government to urgently release money to relevant agencies to confront the disease.
According to the aviation official, the patient landed at the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, Abuja, aboard Ethiopian Airlines Flight ET333.
The revelation provides critical details for contact-tracing, following an earlier official announcement by the Coordinating Minister of Health and Social Welfare, Professor Muhammad Pate, who confirmed the presence of the virus in the nation’s capital.
Pate had disclosed that the female patient had recently returned to Nigeria on an international flight from Uganda and subsequently spent several days receiving care at a private hospital in Abuja before the infection was formally diagnosed.
She has since been transferred to a designated isolation facility where she is currently receiving treatment.
In response, a multi-agency operation involving the Federal Ministry of Health, the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, NCDC, and the FCT Health and Environmental Services Secretariat has commenced extensive contact-tracing.Buy Maps
Public health authorities have so far identified 44 close contacts, including healthcare personnel, fellow hospital patients, caregivers and individuals connected to her travel route.
Consequently, the Federal Government has placed health institutions and port health surveillance units across the country on high alert.
Nigeria confirms first Ebola case is Bundibugyo strain
The first Ebola case detected in Nigeria is the Bundibugyo strain, an emergency meeting on the issue was told yesterday.
“We did three levels of tests, but all molecular. The strain was Bundibugyo,” Olajumoke Babatunde, Director of the Public Health Laboratory Service at NCDC, said yesterday.
The World Health Organization, WHO, which also confirmed that it was the Bundibugyo strain, for which there is still neither a vaccine nor a specific treatment.
“This person is actually a diplomat,” another official said, adding the patient had deteriorated into “multi-organ failure”.
The official did not disclose the nationality of the diplomat.
In August, Uganda was declared officially Ebola-free by WHO after recording 20 cases, almost all people who had travelled from the DRC.
