Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention Director-General Jean Kaseya said a team of Ebola scientists will travel to Nigeria to investigate how the country's first patient in more than a decade was infected with the Bundibugyo species of Ebola¹.

Nation Africa, citing an interview Kaseya gave Reuters in London, identified the patient as the Ugandan-born wife of a Swiss diplomat based in Abuja¹. Kaseya said her travel documents showed she had not visited the outbreak epicenter in the Democratic Republic of Congo¹.

Kaseya said determining how she became ill matters for tracing contacts and for checking whether Bundibugyo Ebola is spreading in locations that have not yet been identified¹. "We have so many unknowns," he said¹.

One line of inquiry is a possible link to Kenya's first reported case, a man who had traveled from Congo and later died¹. Genomic sequencing on Friday showed the viruses that infected the two patients were closely related, Kaseya said¹.

The Nigeria patient had been on holiday in Uganda and traveled through Entebbe Airport on Oct. 3¹. Kaseya said the Kenya patient was likely in the airport at about the same time, with flights about 40 minutes apart, though they did not leave from the same gate and it is not clear whether they had contact¹.

Kaseya said similar genomes do not prove one patient infected the other, and that the Abuja patient, whose condition is improving, has said she does not remember meeting the Kenya patient¹. He said investigators were not ruling out indirect contact through another person¹. Ebola spreads through close contact with bodily fluids of a person who has symptoms, according to the World Health Organization as cited by Nation Africa¹.

Kaseya said countries involved were now willing to collaborate after what he described as tension last week, when Uganda's government said the Abuja patient had been to Congo while Nigerian authorities said she had not and was infected in Uganda, which has been Ebola-free since August¹.

The team will be led by Congolese scientist Jean-Jacques Muyembe, the co-discoverer of Ebola, and will also review more sequencing data on where the Kenya patient was infected, Kaseya said¹.

Nation Africa reported that Congo's Bundibugyo outbreak has caused almost 10,000 cases and more than 4,600 deaths there and has spread to Kenya, Nigeria and Uganda¹. It said there is currently no approved vaccine or treatment for Ebola Bundibugyo¹.

Reuters published a matching headline on the Africa CDC plan; WhatsNewPaper could not read the Reuters article in full².

Not medical advice.