The Federal Government has issued warnings of danger over possible outbreak of Ebola in the country, for the second time since 2014, following a declaration of the recent outbreak of the deadly disease by the United Nations in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The World Health Organization had reported that at least one person has been confirmed dead in the northeastern part of that country.
However, as a result of that frightening development, the managements of Federal Airport Authorities and that of the Ports Authorities were placed on alert and they had subsequently assured Nigerians of adequate surveillance in their respective areas of jurisdictions. Although there is no direct flight from Democratic Republic of Congo to Nigeria, airport authorities have assured that all preventive measures already put in place at the nation’s airports were still intact and functional. Similarly, health officials have been at alert, ever ready to take necessary precautionary measures and surveillance.
Presently, there are sanitizers at the arrival terminals at Nigeria’s gateways with thermal scanning apparatus, replete with camera monitors that display pictures, aside the capturing of passengers’ body temperature. Other preventing measures enforced at the airports include compulsory filling of forms by passengers to ensure they are not potential carriers of the deadly disease. By so doing the government and its health agencies are telling Nigerians that they were up to the task of containing the Ebola outbreak, assuring that there was no cause for alarm.
It would be recalled that this country experienced Ebola outbreak in July 2014 when a Liberian American Patrick Sawyer, earlier heavily infected with the disease, flew into Murtala Muhammad International Airport from Liberia.
He died five days later in Nigeria, even though Nigeria was later able to contain the disease and was subsequently declared Ebola-free by the World Health Organization WHO. Had Nigeria’s airports been earlier fitted with surveillance gadgets, similar to those in place presently, Mr. Sawyer’s pathetic case could have been readily detected and that calamity would have easily been averted.
Many Nigerians believed that had the Liberian victim of the disease been dispatched to a public hospital, where there were no facilities and with many patients, the result would have been disastrous because that would have led to a possibility of uncontrollable spread. Perhaps, such calamity was simply averted by rushing the victim to a first class private hospital on Lagos Island where there was state-of-the-art equipment and highly qualified personnel, but all the same, the medics there had been infected.
Now, in the event of extensive spread of the Ebola disease across the country – and God forbids that – Federal and state medical centers could hardly manage the influx of patients that would seek medical attention or prompt remedy from the killer disease.
That was because most of Nigerian medical setups are dilapidated and in a derelict state, rendering poor services with inadequate infrastructural facilities and overstretched services.
The personnel and health attendants are poorly trained, dispensing services with antiquated and outmoded equipment that could not be properly deployed in such emergency. Unfortunately the federal government did not realize the enormity of the dangers posed by Ebola threat on the country, because it had insinuated that the absence of medical doctors who were on nationwide strike at government hospitals across the country had not affected the management of the Ebola virus yet.
At that instant, the adamant doctors that refused to be patriotic and answer the call to action to defend their profession and serve their people diligently did not have a rethink or reconsidered their attitude towards the self-serving strike. Nevertheless, the unpatriotic doctors continued to stay away from their workplaces ignoring the possibility of the quick spread of the disease. Many feared that could lead to massive deaths of people and accordingly implored the doctors not to remain aloof and inflexible, watching their fellow countrymen die like filthy pigs.
However, it was heartening to hear the government and its agents are now reiterating their determination to prevent the outbreak of Ebola Virus in the country and prevent all citizens from contracting the disease. In that regard, it should also set up a high-powered Treatment Research Committee to demonstrate its seriousness in evolving strategic ways of taming the spread of the disease that inspires great fear.
Nigeria has the track record and potentials of fighting any outbreak of contagious disease in the country by taking prompt and urgent measures to immunize and cure its citizens, and it must certainly deploy its expertise in that regard positively and decisively to fight the Ebola epidemic effectively and realistically.
Therefore, the advent of the disease in this country can actually be stopped using the same kind of long-term investments in health sector especially in infrastructural facilities as was done in the fight against similar killer diseases in the past. Although modern technologies of fighting epidemics are costly and prohibitive, Nigeria can conveniently afford to import them. Therefore, no effort should be spared and no amount of money is too much for any enterprise that will protect and promote the welfare and health of the Nigerian people.
