Patrick Sawyer, a WASH consultant at the Ministry of Finance, who had been quarantined since falling ill after arriving in Lagos for a conference last Sunday, has been reported dead. Various reports claimed a Liberian government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the news of Sawyer’s death was relayed to Liberia by the Nigerian embassy, on Friday morning. Yewande Adeshina, a Special Adviser to the Governor of Lagos on Thursday, told a news conference that Sawyer, 40 was being tested for the deadly Ebola virus in Lagos Adeshina said details of the suspected case were obtained from a private health facility in the state, adding that the 40-year old man had no contact with Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) as he did not visit any person with EVD in the hospital and neither did he partake in the burial of any person who died of the disease. “However, on account of working and living in an endemic region for EVD, and the presentation of non-specific constitutional symptoms and signs of fever, malaise, body aches, vomiting, diarrhea and others associated with EVD, a high index of suspension was raised,” Adeshina said. “Based on this, blood samples were taken to Virology Reference Laboratory, Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH), on Tuesday. Preliminary results necessitated the confirmation of EVD at a World Health Organization, WHO Reference Laboratory in Dakar, Senegal which is actively in process,” she added. Sawyer’s death is the first recorded case of one of the world’s deadliest diseases in Nigeria. Ebola has killed 632 people across Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone since an outbreak began in February, straining a string of weak health systems despite international help. The virus — which starts off with flu-like symptoms and often ends with horrific hemorrhaging — has infected about 1,048 people and killed an estimated 632 since this winter, according to the numbers on July 17 from the World Health Organization. Ebola is both rare and very deadly. Since the first outbreak in 1976, Ebola viruses have infected thousands of people and killed about one-third of them. Symptoms can come on very quickly and kill fast:
Posted on: Fri, 25 Jul 2014 15:56:31 +0000
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