CORPSES TRAPPED AT AIRPORT OVER EBOLA SCARE.

CORPSES TRAPPED AT AIRPORT OVER EBOLA SCARE.

About four corpses are currently stranded at the Murtala Mohammed International Airport, Lagos, as airport authorities refused to grant clearance for families of the deceased to take delivery over Ebola scare.

Sources at the airport said the refusal to grant the clearance was hinged on alleged order by Minister of Health, Onyebuchi Chukwu, that no corpse be brought into the country for now.

It was not immediately possible to identify the airlines that brought the corpses, but a top airport staff said they would soon be forced into a plane and returned to country of death.

“This is beyond us at the airport, we have subsisting instruction to bar corpses from being brought into the country for now, and until that order is rescinded, we cannot allow the corpses in,” an airport staff that spoke under condition of anonymity said.

Lagos State Governor, Babatunde Fashola, however, on Sunday allayed the fears over the spread of the Ebola virus.

He assured that the virus has not reached an epidemic stage in Nigeria and that government was doing everything possible to prevent such because of the grave consequences it portends to safety of human lives.

Fashola, who spoke in a state-wide broadcast, also disclosed that 61 persons who had primary and secondary contacts with the late Patrick Sawyer, the Liberian-American who imported the deadly virus into Nigeria, had been cleared after the 21 days surveillance which is the known lifespan of the Ebola virus.

He added that the cleared patients were not sick, but that they were persons who needed to be monitored because of real or suspected contacts to be certain that they did not eventually fall sick.

The Governor added the broadcast became necessary because of the need to respond to a series of text messages, e-mails and telephone calls inquiring about the efforts of government on the virus and the allegations that victims were being neglected.

While denying the allegations, Fashola added that it was not true that a useful drug or vaccine was being rejected or that there was a shortage of funds.

“What is true is that we should perhaps never have been in this situation, but we are now in it.

“What is true is that the Ebola virus did not break out from within Nigeria, it was imported into Nigeria.

“What is true is that we have followed all the contacts that we know who have had primary and secondary contacts with the patient who imported the virus into our state, or with people who had contact with him.

“Because we had to react to an unexpected situation, we had to react in a proper and methodical way, according to acceptable global health standards.

“I can now tell you that in the last one week, with the help and advice of our technical partners, such as the World Health Organisation (WHO), the Centre for Disease Control and the Medicines Sans Frontiers, who have tracked this virus and studied it for decades, our response is a lot better than when the news first broke; and our capacity is increasing daily.

“Although we have suffered very painful losses of lives, I think it is fair to say that we are not yet at an epidemic stage and we are determined to do everything not to get to that stage; because of the grave consequences to the safety of human lives,” Fashola assured.

Speaking on government efforts, he said: “Since Monday last week, precisely on the 11th of August, I commenced meetings on an almost daily basis with stakeholders in our society, religious leaders, traditional rulers, market men and women, community development associations, to brief them of the risk, to re-assure them that we are daily gaining control, to advise them and all of you to be cautious but not to panic.

“My view of the fact that we are gaining control, is informed by verifiable facts that I receive daily from our health workers that all the cases of those who have either unfortunately died, or those who are sick, and those who are contacts under surveillance are directly traceable to the imported case.

“There is also now the news that a confirmed victim has fully recovered, which reinforces the advice from our experts that it is not an automatic death sentence.

“This is encouraging news from which our containment strategy can profit greatly; because it means that we do not have any case of unknown origin, which will raise the risk of an epidemic,” the Governor added.

Source: #Daily_Independent