African press review 1 August 2014

Nigeria goes on Ebola alert but researchers have found a plant that may stop the virus. Ghana's government is accused of failing to finance the anti-Ebola fight. Kenya's authorities try to calm Ebola fears. 

Nigeria’s minister of health has issued a red alert for Ebola after the death in Lagos of a Liberian-American who contracted the deadly virus.

Patrick Sawyer arrived Lagos on an Asky Airline flight from Monrovia via Lomé four days before his death. Punch reports that two persons who helped 40-year-old Sawyer disembark from the plane have been placed on quarantine, while 69 more of the passengers are under surveillance for three weeks.

Health Minister Professor Onyebuchi Chukwu is quoted as saying at a press conference that they are working with the airlines to track down some passengers who are still to be identified.

The Sun says 59 medical and airport personnel who had contact with him were being placed in isolation in line with World Health Organisation guidelines. Sawyer’s body has meanwhile been cremated and his ashes sent to his family in accordance with their wish.

As wild rumours spread in Nigeria that you could contract the disease through a handshake, Chukwu reportedly urged Nigerians not to panic. He announced that airline operators, the transport and tourism ministries and other stakeholders such as the Road Transport Employers Association of Nigeria are holding emergency meetings to see how to manage people arriving Nigeria from the west African coast.

Punch says the government is pushing the communications boundary to involve mobile phone providers in order to prevent the spread of the deadly epidemic in Nigeria.

Vanguard meanwhile reports that the body of an Anambra State man flown into Nigeria from Liberia has been impounded by the state government following fears that he died of Ebola. According to the paper, security operatives have cordoned off the Apex Hospital Mortuary in Oyi where the body was deposited, pending investigations by health experts.

Some 50 persons who had been in contact with the corpse have been quarantined, according to the Nation.

The paper is reporting a breakthrough in the search for a cure to the deadly disease – a finding by Professor Maurice Iwu, head of Nigeria’s Bio Resources Development and Conservation Programme, that a plant commonly eaten in west Africa known as garcinia kola has been found to halt the virus in its tracks in laboratory tests.

In Ghana the Chronicle raises an alarm at news that the government may be pinching pesewas in an anti-Ebola budget presented to it by the ministry of health. For the paper, not only is the government said to have slashed the budget by about three quarters, it has more critically failed to release the peanuts thus approved. If these reports are true, it warns, that could only be the result of criminal ignorance in high places.

In Kenya, meanwhile, the Daily Nation newspaper says the government moved on Thursday to allay fears that Ebola has reached the country and said it would not impose restrictions on international travel.

Medical Services Director Nicholas Muraguri told the paper that doctors and other medical personnel had been deployed at all entry points and equipped to detect and manage any infections they come across. According to the Nairobi-based publication, Muraguri assured Kenyans that they were not under imminent threat from the contagion that has killed more than 700 people in west Africa.

In South Africa BusinessDay reports that for scientists tracking the virus in west Africa it’s not about complex virology and genotyping but about how contagious microbes - like humans - use planes, bikes and taxis to spread. According to the paper, the authorities have so far taken no action to limit international travel in the region after the airlines association Iata said on Thursday that the World Health Organisation was not recommending any such restrictions or frontier closures.

The Johannesburg journal quotes experts on the killer disease as saying that the risk of the virus moving to other continents was low. But they insist that tracing every person who might have had contact with an infected case is vital to getting on top of the outbreak.