LAGOS
Nigerian officials have confirmed that one of the doctors who had attended to a Liberian man who had died recently of Ebola had contracted the deadly virus himself.
"There is a new case of the virus," Health Minister Onyebuchi Chukwu said in Abuja, Nigeria's capital.
"This new case is one of the doctors who attended to the Liberian Ebola patient," he added.
The doctor, according to health ministry officials, is one of the over 70 people being watched for the virus.
"He is one of those already quarantined and placed under watch, having had a contact with Patrick Sawyer, the Liberian who recently died as a result of the disease," one senior official told Anadolu Agency, asking not to be named.
Sawyer died barely one week after he had shown signs of the virus while on a flight to Nigeria from Monrovia, the Liberian capital.
He had been admitted to First Consultant Medical Centre in Lagos, Nigeria's commercial city with roughly 18 million residents.
"It is true that a doctor has tested positive to the virus but there is no cause for alarms," Yewande Adesina, a senior health official with the Lagos government, told AA.
"Everything is being done to avoid spread," she added.
Ebola, a contagious disease for which there is no known treatment or cure, can be transmitted to humans from wild animals and also spreads through contact with the body fluids of an infected person or someone who has died of the disease.
Medical doctors say common symptoms of Ebola include high fever and headaches, followed by bleeding from openings in the body.
The tropical fever, which first appeared in 1976 in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, has killed 208 people in Guinea, 60 in Liberia and 188 in Sierra Leone until July 23.
On Tuesday, West African airline Asky suspended flights to Liberia and Sierra Leone over concerns about the spread of the deadly virus.
www.aa.com.tr/en
