Ebola virus disease outbreak in Nigeria: transmission dynamics and rapid control
- 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
- 2014. Ebola virus disease outbreak in Nigeria: transmission dynamics and rapid control. PeerJ PrePrints 2:e569v2 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.569v2
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 can be high, our study illustrates the time window for successful containment of EVD outbreaks caused by infected air travelers.
Author Comment
This version of the manuscript has been submitted to Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) on November 18, 2014. It includes two additional co-authors who contributed to the interpretation of the results.