Ebola Outbreak: 30,000 In Nigeria Believed Exposed To Virus, And No One Knows Who They Are

The catastrophic Ebola outbreak in West Africa may be spreading faster than health experts previously believed. Yesterday, officials in Nigeria said that they were looking for up to 59 people who may have been exposed to the lethal virus by flying on a plane with Liberian-American Patrick Sawyer, who died soon after getting off a flight in Lagos.

On Wednesday, the health authorities there said that they have expanded their search from 59 people — to 30,000.

And those 30,000

people could be anywhere, with most of them not even realizing they have been exposed to Ebola.

Everyone At Airports Visited by Sawyer Believed To Be At Risk

The staggering figure of 30,000 possible Ebola virus carriers was arrived at because officials now say that not only the people who flew on the same plane as Sawyer could have been exposed, but anyone in any of the four airports where the 40-year-old dad of three stopped on his journey from Monrovia, Liberia, to Lagos is believed to be at risk.

The number also includes anyone who came into contact with Sawyer when he got off of his ASKY Airlines flight in the 21-million-population city of Lagos, the most populous city on the African continent and a major international trade and travel hub.

‘We’re actually looking at contacting over 30,000 people in this very scenario. Because any and everybody that has contacted this person is going to be treated as a suspect,” Yewande Adeshina, a Nigerian health adviser, told the Voice of America News.

“This is the worst Ebola outbreak the world has ever seen,” Mike Noyes of the international charity group ActionAid told Britain’s Mirror newspaper. “If anyone could answer the question ‘Why?’we might be able to stop it. Instead, the reach of the spider web of infection is growing.”

Liberia To Use Military To Quarantine Whole Communities

In Liberia, along with Guinea and Sierra Leone one of the three African countries hit hardest by the Ebola outbreak, the government announced that it will begin closing schools and possibly placing whole towns under quarantine in a desperate attempt to check the alarming spread of the virus, which so far has claimed 672 lives.

But quarantining entire communities will require the use of Liberia’s security force against the country’s own population, which threatens to create an entirely new level of problems.

“This is a major public health emergency. It’s fierce, deadly and many of our countrymen are dying, and we need to act to stop the spread,” said Liberian Information Minister Lewis Brown, in an interview with the news agency Reuters. “We are hoping there will be a level of understanding and that there will not be a need for exceptional force.”

The global health group Doctors Without Borders has characterized the Ebola outbreak as “absolutely out of control,” and the group’s director of operations, Bart Jannsens said that the outbreak “can only get worse.”