According to Maku, the meeting was almost devoted to deliberations over the the Ebola virus in its entirety and was presided over by President Goodluck Jonathan.
Guardian NG reports:
He noted that on the directive of
the president, he and his health counterpart, Prof. Onyebuchi
Chukwu,
briefed the council on the progress so far recorded since the outbreak
of the Ebola.
He said the first major step the
ministry had taken was to quarantine all those who had primary contacts
with Sawyer. “So far, as the ministry reported this morning, all those
who had primary contacts with the subject had been quarantined which is
the way the global community handles the disease and the secondary
contacts have also been traced.
“There is a strong team in Lagos
which has been set up by the emergency response centre that is tracing
every contact that has been made with either the index case or with
primary contacts. So far the number of people that have been traced is
198. Out of this number, 177 are in Lagos and they are being traced,
some are in quarantine, some are being monitored by health specialists,
with their movements being monitored and they are under directive from
the Ministry of Health.
“So those in quarantine include
people who have so far made contacts with index case or secondary. So
198 of them, 177 in Lagos and 21 persons in Enugu are also being
watched. This is because one of the nurses that was involved in the
treatment of the index case, unfortunately disobeyed medical
instructions and somehow travelled to Enugu. We have no problems as all
those who had been in contact with her, including her husband are also
under quarantine and so the medical team had been able to trace all
those who made contacts with her.
“Apart from those who made
contacts with the late Sawyer, and the secondary contacts with those who
handled his case, there has not been any known case in Nigeria that has
the probability of contracting this virus. Nigeria has responded with
the best international standards that can be imagined,” he said.
He said the disease had not reached
the proportion of an epidemic, noting that so far only 10 persons had
been tested positive, including the late Sawyer. He said two citizens,
one of them being the nurse who handled the Sawyer and the second one
was the protocol officer, who welcomed him at the airport and helped in
conveying him to hospital.
He said the country had moved in a
way that it had not done before, “ and globally the standards we have
kept, the efforts we have made, the policies we have deployed, the
measures we have taken surely should give our citizens and the world at
large the confidence that Nigeria is doing everything possible to
contain this virus.
“In addition to this, the Ministry
of Health has also been in close touch with all the state governments.
And the governors are receiving continuous briefings on the measures we
have taken and what we should do at the state level.”
The minister allayed the fear of
the existence of the virus in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT),
Abuja, noting that with the containment policy already put in place by
the Federal Government, Nigerians had no cause to be worried.
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