A member of staff of ECOWAS
on the team that received the late Patrick Sawyer, the Liberian-American
diplomat, who died of Ebola in Lagos, made a trip to Port Harcourt where he
checked into a hotel and met with Dr. Iyke Enemuo. The ECOWAS official whose
name was also not given by Chukwu, was said to have had contact with the index
case in Nigeria (Patrick Sawyer). He was placed under surveillance in Lagos but
he escaped to Port Harcourt where he checked into a hotel and contacted Enemuo
for treatment. The official recovered from the ailment and returned to Lagos.
Health workers were said to have tested him when he allegedly came for a
clearance certificate and gave him a clean bill of health.
But the Rivers State
Government said “about 100 contacts from a hotel, patients of Dr. Enemuo and patients
of the hospital where Enemuo was treated until his demise have been identified
and restricted. About a week after his departure, Enemuo took ill and was
rushed to a hospital where he presented with symptoms of fever, diarrhea and
vomiting. In the course of treatment, the managing physician became suspicious
and took samples for investigation. Few days later, Enemuo died on August 22,
2014. His body was deposited in a mortuary in Port Harcourt. Enemuo’s widow,
who is also a medical doctor and who cared for him during his illness, has
taken ill. She is being quarantined. A few hours later, results of the test
carried out on samples taken from Dr. Enemuo came back positive of EVD.”
A resident of Port Harcourt,
said in her Facebook post, that before he took ill on Tuesday, “operated on a
woman on Monday presumably after treating the diplomat.”
“It’s quite a calamity
unfolding in Port Harcourt. Unfortunately, the city’s health facilities
are not quite ready to contain Ebola at the moment, He (Enemuo) fell ill next
day Tuesday and died last Friday. No one knew about the hotel angle which was a
very big risk he took…and unethical thing to do. He was ill for three days and
then started vomiting blood. He was first rushed to one hospital where he was
rejected and then taken to Good Heart Hospital whose owner is a Cardiologist
and a consultant physician with the University of Port Harcourt Teaching
Hospital. He died there.
“The doctor that died practices
in East West Road, Rumuokoro…Sam Steel clinic. The wife, also a doctor, has a
three-month-old baby. A member of the Emergency Operation Centre for Ebola in
Lagos, Prof. Oyewale Tomori said:
“Initially many
people who came into contact with Sawyer were not forthcoming with the truth.
It was difficult to trace some contacts who did not leave any address. They could
not trace the ECOWAS diplomat for days. Surveillance is the duty of everyone.
And we must follow international guidelines and regulation. If we take your
temperature and say we will be back tomorrow by 8am to take another, we expect
that you should cooperate, but that was not the case.
“Some even travelled, and
their people were also not ready to disclose where they went. Some even denied
the degree of contact that they had with Sawyer.”
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