Kenya Says Ebola Case Is an Incident, Not an Outbreak

Kenya’s Cabinet Secretary for Health, Aden Duale, has rejected describing the country’s Ebola situation as an outbreak, saying authorities are managing an isolated incident while expanding efforts to identify people who may have been exposed.

Speaking on Wednesday, Duale said Kenya had recorded an Ebola incident after the country’s reported first death from the disease. He said officials were able to trace the patient’s journey through several locations before the individual reached a hospital in Nairobi.

“There’s no Ebola outbreak in Kenya. What we have is an important incident, an Ebola incident in our country,” Duale said, adding that authorities could account for the patient’s route from an unidentified location to Kisangani, Beni, Kinshasa, Kampala, Nairobi and finally a Nairobi hospital.

Contact tracing expanded

Duale said the number of identified contacts had increased from 55 to 57 after two additional people were located. Ten of those contacts had been accounted for and placed in quarantine, where they were being checked daily for symptoms.

The monitoring is taking place at the National Police Service Hospital in Nairobi. Authorities are continuing efforts to locate the remaining contacts, although the number still unaccounted for was not provided.

The case involves a Kenyan citizen who had been living in Congo and was identified as the country’s first confirmed case of the disease over the weekend, according to the report. The supplied account also describes the patient as the victim of Kenya’s first death from Ebola, but does not explain the relationship between the two descriptions.

Regional background

The reported travel route included locations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda and Kenya. Kisangani and Beni are in the DRC, while Kampala is in Uganda and Nairobi is in Kenya.

The report said the DRC declared an Ebola outbreak in May after the disease had spread for months in an isolated part of eastern Congo. Kenya’s health authorities are now focusing on tracing and monitoring contacts linked to the case.

Duale said the search for additional contacts had been intensified as the 10 people already identified remained under daily observation at the Nairobi facility.