Nigeria confirms its first Ebola patient in over a decade, and health teams across Africa are racing to trace how the virus got there.
Nigeria is back on Ebola alert. Health officials across the continent are scrambling to work out how the country's first patient in more than a decade became infected, and the outbreak has now reached a fourth African country.
The Swiss foreign ministry said on Friday that the patient is the Ugandan-born wife of a Swiss diplomat based in Abuja. She had not travelled to the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the outbreak was first detected in mid-May before it spread to Uganda, Kenya and now Nigeria. That detail is what has made the case so worrying, because it doesn't fit the route many had expected.
The ministry said she is believed to have caught the virus while travelling with her husband in Uganda. That points to a link with the existing outbreak in East Africa, but the exact chain of transmission is what investigators are now trying to pin down. Until they do, questions remain about who else may have been exposed and how far the virus has travelled.
For a continent where borders are busy with trade, family visits, diplomacy and sport, a case popping up in Abuja is a reminder of how quickly a regional outbreak can become a multi-country emergency. Nigeria has dealt with Ebola before, and the coming days will test how quickly tracing, testing and cross-border coordination can contain this one.
Afroballers will keep following the story as more details are confirmed.
