--- title: Nigeria Confirms First Ebola Death Outside Lagos description: Nigeria confirmed Thursday the country's first Ebola-related death outside Lagos, the country's main international transit hub. canonical: https://time.com/3204303/nigeria-ebola-death/ author: Naina Bajekal article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2014-08-28T11:33:56.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T08:00:47.654Z article:section: Health og:title: Nigeria confirms spread of Ebola to Port Harcourt og:description: Nigeria confirmed Thursday the country's first Ebola-related death outside Lagos, the country's main international transit hub. og:url: https://time.com/3204303/nigeria-ebola-death/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt694adbb269f3c130/6986a08ce53abae99c4d41e2/nigeria-ebola.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 4848 og:image:height: 2727 og:image:alt: Nigeria Ebola og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Nigeria confirms spread of Ebola to Port Harcourt twitter:description: Nigeria confirmed Thursday the country's first Ebola-related death outside Lagos, the country's main international transit hub. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt694adbb269f3c130/6986a08ce53abae99c4d41e2/nigeria-ebola.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Nigeria Confirms First Ebola Death Outside Lagos > Sponsored content. 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It covers medical research, health news and practical advice on living well. #### Where can I get reliable health news by email? Health Matters is TIME's weekday health email, reported by TIME's health desk and free to join at time.com/newsletters. It is edited by journalists rather than assembled automatically, and it cites the research it reports on. #### Is Health Matters free? Yes. Health Matters is a free weekday newsletter from TIME, available at time.com/newsletters. #### Who reads TIME's Health Matters newsletter? Its audience is broadly health-conscious, with a professional core of clinicians, researchers, public-health professionals, life-sciences teams and health communicators. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-health-2026q3/newsletters?i=1ca91707-0fae-47cf-abf6-b79191280824&cr=time-nl-health-2026q3-v1) ## Video: Meet The CDC Doctors Fighting Ebola [Watch (HLS stream): Meet The CDC Doctors Fighting Ebola](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/G194AmTC.m3u8) (2:32)  _Published 2014-08-13. Meet The CDC Doctors Fighting Ebola_  by [Naina Bajekal](https://time.com/author/naina-bajekal/)  ## Naina Bajekal Bajekal was executive editor and international editor at TIME. Aug 28, 2014 11:33 AM UTC  Nigerian health officials wait to screen passengers at the arrival hall of Murtala Muhammed International Airport in Lagos, Nigeria on Aug. 4, 2014. Nigerian health officials wait to screen passengers at the arrival hall of Murtala Muhammed International Airport in Lagos, Nigeria on Aug. 4, 2014. Sunday Alamba/AP  by [Naina Bajekal](https://time.com/author/naina-bajekal/)  ## Naina Bajekal Bajekal was executive editor and international editor at TIME. Aug 28, 2014 11:33 AM UTC Nigeria confirmed Thursday the country’s first Ebola-related death outside Lagos, the country’s main international transit hub. The victim, an unnamed doctor who died in the southeastern oil city of Port Harcourt, marks Nigeria’s sixth Ebola death in a recent outbreak of the disease primarily affecting West Africa. He is believed to have been infected by a man linked to Nigeria’s first Ebola case, Patrick Sawyer, who died in Lagos shortly after arriving there from Liberia. The yet-unnamed doctor had died last Friday, but Nigerian Health Minister Onyebuchi Chukwu waited until Thursday to confirm the case, the [BBC](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-28966258) reports. The doctor’s wife has been put under quarantine, while an additional 70 people suspected to have had contact with him are being monitored in Port Harcourt. While the death marks a blow to Nigeria’s efforts to contain the disease, Mr. Chukwu noted that while “the problem is not over . . . Nigeria is doing well on containment, all the disease in Nigeria were all traced to Patrick Sawyer.” The Nigerian government said Wednesday that schools in the country would not reopen until October 13 in order to help prevent the outbreak from spreading. Recent figures from the World Health Organization suggest Ebola has infected more than 3,000 people and killed over half of its victims, largely in West Africa. More than 240 health workers have been infected with the deadly virus, for which there is no vaccine or cure, though it is treatable and survivable. Ebola is not airborne, and is spread only when humans come into contact with the bodily fluids of those infected with the virus. West Africa’s health ministers will be meeting later Thursday to discuss measures to address what’s become the largest-ever Ebola epidemic. \[[_BBC_](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-28966258)\] ## Transcript This Ebola outbreak is unprecedented. This is definitely a marathon and not a sprint. The bugs have evolved. The outbreak has gotten bigger. We are only as strong as the weakest link, and we have learned from Ebola that West Africa was a very weak link. [ MUSIC ] There's small clinics, these are like one room places where sick people might go in their house with maybe an auxiliary nurse as some one who has a little bit of medical training, but defiantly not the same standards that we would have here in the US. We're facing 3 main threats. The first is the threat of new organisms. It was coming and spreading in different places. The second is drug- resistant bacteria, and the third are intentionally created organisms. What we do in an outbreak response is continuously see how can we make it better. The exercises we've gone through both, re- evaluating our own protocols but also understanding what the public and governmental responses are has really helped us understand. How to take care of these patients in the larger context of our healthcare systems. And, those who are in the building, I would urge you to come down to either the ops team room, or the, When designing a unit that is designed to accept patients with serious communicable diseases, like Ebola, there are ways to design a unit so that it's function. Functional. Any hospital that can isolate a patient in a single patient room with a bathroom and can follow our infection control recommendations is capable of safely caring for a patient with Ebola. And we've tried to encourage every single hospital in the country to have an antibiotic stewardship program to improve antibiotic prescribing practices. There is a concern about fatigue as we go on that, the CDC other groups have sort of ramping up now to try to surge resources into the area. What we're also realizing is, we need to be able to maintain that surge for many months to keep the pressure on to completely control the outbreak. Time will tell in the next few weeks if we can start to see those numbers going in the right direction. Fewer new cases each day or each week. The single most important thing to understand about protecting Americans from Ebola is that can best be done by stopping it at the source in Africa. Its normal to be scared of something as deadly as Ebola and for the general public I really hope we can never let our fear undermine our compassion. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/3204303/nigeria-ebola-death/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/3204303/nigeria-ebola-death/"},"headline":"Nigeria Confirms First Ebola Death Outside Lagos","datePublished":"2014-08-28T11:33:56.000Z","dateModified":"2026-08-04T08:00:47.654Z","description":"Doctor who died in southeastern city marks Nigeria's sixth Ebola death","url":"https://time.com/3204303/nigeria-ebola-death/","keywords":["Infectious Disease","Nigeria","ebola"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt694adbb269f3c130/6986a08ce53abae99c4d41e2/nigeria-ebola.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Naina Bajekal","jobTitle":"Bajekal was executive editor and international editor at TIME.","url":"https://time.com/author/naina-bajekal/"}],"articleSection":"Health","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt694adbb269f3c130/6986a08ce53abae99c4d41e2/nigeria-ebola.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"Nigeria Ebola","caption":"Nigeria Ebola","creditText":"Sunday Alamba/AP","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/health/","name":"Health"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/infectious-disease/","name":"Infectious Disease"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/3204303/nigeria-ebola-death/","name":"Nigeria Confirms First Ebola Death Outside Lagos"}}]},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Meet The CDC Doctors Fighting Ebola","description":"Meet The CDC Doctors Fighting Ebola","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/G194AmTC/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2014-08-13T23:41:12.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/G194AmTC.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/3204303/nigeria-ebola-death/","duration":"PT2M32S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/3204303/nigeria-ebola-death/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}}] ```