Following the infection of the doctor and death of another nurse who both participated in the treatment of late Ebola victim, Patrick Sawyer, officials of the Lagos State Government have undertaken a search for 27 other people who might have had contact with the late Sawyer or any of the doctors, nurses and health workers who attended to the late Liberian-American at a hospital in Lagos.
Lagos State Commissioner for Health, Jide Idris.
According to the Lagos State Commissioner for Health, Dr. Jide Idris, the government is searching for as many as 27 people and as well planning a life insurance cover for doctors and other health professionals to work as volunteers in the monitoring and testing suspected cases of the Disease.
At a press conference today in Lagos, Idris said the government has the challenge of shortage of experts, doctors and health workers needed to attend to those already infected and those likely to be isolated for monitoring going forward.
“We will provide a life insurance for any doctor, nurse and other experts that want to work with isolated patients. We need more hands, because we have moved from the stage of primary contacts to secondary contacts.
“We are tracing all the people that had contact, not just with (the late) Sawyer, but those that had contacts with the health workers and others that have died.
“We have identified 27 secondary contacts already, we tracing the addresses of others.
“It is a tedious task, because we will also be taking their blood samples for testing and we will be monitoring them.
“We are appealing to the doctors on strike to resume work and set aside their grievances. No doubt, this situation is a dire emergency and our health professionals must recognise that.
“It will be morally unjustifiable for us to call for help from the international community if our own experts and doctors are not working.
“The bottom line is that we cannot provide the requisite expertise needed to manage these confirmed and probable cases, Idris said.
The commissioners said the government would also be evacuating tuberculosis patients at the Infectious Diseases Hospital in Yaba, Lagos, to another hospital to accommodate more suspected and isolated cases.
“The TB patients at Mainland Hospital were protesting this morning but we appealed to them, that if they stay there they might be exposed and get infected.
“If we need to evacuate any hospital to ensure that we contain this disease, we will do it. If we have to take suspected cases to LASUTH, we will do it. If we need to take decisions that will be inconvenient for some people but beneficial to the larger population, we will do it. Ebola is a highly infectious disease by . We will do it to contain it,” he added.
