Monday 18 August 2014

Baby Suspected Of Having Ebola Virus Dies Of Malaria.

Kwara State Committee on Control and Prevention of Ebola Virus Disease on Sunday revealed that a seven-month old baby suspected to be suffering from the Ebola disease in the state has died of illness said to be related to malaria.

The Chairman of the committee, Sunday Opabodola, who made this known in an interview with Daily Independent reporter, said it was discovered that the baby didn’t have the deadly disease after a confirmation came from the result of the test done on the blood sample of the baby at the Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH) that reads negative.

He said the baby was suspected to have been infected with the deadly virus after showing Ebola-like symptoms like blood seen in his vomits, a development that made the state government take the boy to isolation centre at the state Specialist Hospital and took sample of his blood for the test.

Opabodola said the result confirmed that there is no suspected or real case of Ebola in the state, and urged people to stop spreading rumour about Ebola outbreak in the state. He, however, stressed that people should take seriously the advice they were given on how to avoid infection and spread of the Ebola virus.

Below is an excerpt from the interview:

“We took the blood sample of the boy and his mother and sent it to the Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH) for screening. Unfortunately, we lost the boy the second day. The fortunate thing is that the result of the boy and mother’s test came in yesterday (Saturday) night from LUTH and it was negative. So I am happy to tell all Kwarans that up till now we don’t have any report of a suspicious case not to talk about confirmed case.I can say that the boy’s case was a mismanaged malaria disease in the first hospital. The history we later got was that when they could not rehydrate him intravenously in the first hospital, they gave him an intubation (putting a tube through the nose into the stomach) to feed him.When he was not responding they removed the tube and transferred him to the paediatrician’s hospital in town and the first vomiting the boy had contained blood. Intubation can cause bleeding from the stomach and that is exactly what happened” Opabodola said.

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