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Ebola virus disease outbreak in Nigeria: lessons to learn

, ,
  Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine (ISPM), University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.569v1
Published
Accepted
Subject Areas
Computational Biology, Mathematical Biology, Epidemiology, Infectious Diseases, Public Health
Keywords
mathematical model, outbreak, Nigeria, basic reproduction number, Ebola virus disease
Copyright
© 2014 Althaus et al.
Licence
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
Cite this article
Althaus CL, Gsteiger S, Low N. 2014. Ebola virus disease outbreak in Nigeria: lessons to learn. PeerJ PrePrints 2:e569v1

Abstract

International air travel has already spread Ebola virus disease (EVD) to major cities as part of the unprecedented epidemic that started in Guinea in December 2013. An infected airline passenger arrived in Nigeria on July 20, 2014 and caused an outbreak in Lagos and then Port Harcourt. After a total of 20 reported cases, including 8 deaths, Nigeria was declared EVD free on October 20, 2014. We quantified the impact of early control measures in preventing further spread of EVD in Nigeria and calculated the risk that a single undetected case will cause a new outbreak. We fitted an EVD transmission model to data from the outbreak in Nigeria and estimated the basic reproduction number R0 = 9.0 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 5.2-15.6). We also found that the net reproduction number Rt fell below unity 15 days (95% CI: 11-21 days) after the arrival of the index case. Using the estimated value of R0 in Nigeria, we calculated that the risk of an outbreak from a single undetected case was 89% (95% CI: 81-94%). Even though R0 in Nigeria was high, EVD outbreaks caused by infected air travelers can be successfully contained if control measures are rapidly implemented.

Author Comment

This manuscript will be submitted elsewhere.

Additional Information

Competing Interests

Christian L. Althaus serves as an Academic Editor for PeerJ. We declare no competing interests.

Author Contributions

Christian L Althaus conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Sandro Gsteiger conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Nicola Low conceived and designed the experiments, wrote the paper, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Funding

Christian L. Althaus is funded by an Ambizione grant and Sandro Gsteiger by the EpideMMIC (Epidemiology and Mathematical Modelling for Infectious disease Control) project, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (grants 136737 and 135654, respectively). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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