Yesterday, when reporting on the latest tragic development in the wost ever Ebola outbreak to sweep through west Africa, namely that the head doctor tasked with containing the virus had himself contracted it, we commented that the “only good news, if any, is that even as the epidemic which has raged for months, and now appears to be out of control, it has not spilled out of Africa into other continents yet.” That may not be the case for much longer following an update earlier today by Reuters that a Liberian man in his 40s is being tested for the deadly Ebola virus in Nigeria’s commercial capital of Lagos, a megacity of 21 million people, the Lagos State Health Ministry said on Thursday.
This would be the first recorded case of one of the world’s deadliest diseases in Nigeria, Africa’s biggest economy and most populous nation, with 170 million people and some of Africa’s least adequate health infrastructure.
What is worse is that, if indeed confirmed that he has been infected, the scramble will now begin to find and quarantine any and all other people he may have been in contact with in recent weeks, a task which in a city of over 20 million – the world’s fourth most populous city after Being and above Istanbul – will be like finding a rational thinker in the Princeton economics department.
And where things get really dicey is if any of those infected people somehow managed to get on a plane in the last few days and departed for destinations unknown. At that point a watching of the 1995 Ebola thriller “Outbreak” may be in order.
via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1z8xv3S Tyler Durden