Nigeria clears 62 Ebola contacts with zero infections after 21-day monitoring

Nigerian health authorities completed a 21-day monitoring period for all 62 people who had contact with the country's first Ebola patient in more than a decade, finding no secondary transmission.

The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (NCDC) confirmed Friday that none of the 62 contacts developed the disease. Thirteen of them reported fever or non-specific symptoms during monitoring but all tested negative for the virus.

Nigeria confirmed the index case on 20 October — a Swiss woman who had travelled to Uganda before returning to Nigeria. She and her husband were evacuated to Switzerland, where she recovered and was discharged from hospital.

The NCDC cautioned that completing contact monitoring does not by itself constitute an end-of-outbreak declaration. Under World Health Organization protocols, a country must complete a full 42-day countdown from the recovery or departure of the last confirmed patient before that declaration can be made.

Seven Ebola alerts across five Nigerian states were investigated over the past three weeks; all seven tested negative.

The current outbreak originated in Ituri in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo in May and has since spread to eight DRC provinces as well as Uganda, France, Kenya and Nigeria. In the DRC it is the second-largest Ebola outbreak on record, having infected more than 11,000 people and killed more than 5,000, according to government data. The outbreak involves the rare Bundibugyo strain, for which no approved treatments or vaccines exist.