A woman living in Nigeria who was infected with the Ebola virus and her spouse, a Swiss diplomat, have been admitted to hospitals in Switzerland after they were flown in from Nigeria on Monday, Swiss authorities said.
The man was admitted to the University Hospital Zurich, while his wife was taken for treatment at the Geneva University Hospital, the Canton of Geneva said.
“This situation does not pose any risk to public health in Switzerland,” the Swiss government said in a statement.
The patient, the Ugandan-born wife of a Swiss diplomat based in Abuja, is Nigeria’s first Ebola case in more than a decade.
The outbreak, which started in Democratic Republic of Congo, has now been reported in four countries in East, Central and West Africa, giving it the widest geographic spread of any Ebola outbreak on the continent to date.
The patient arrived in Nigeria after spending two weeks in Uganda, raising concerns over potential transmission in a country that was declared Ebola free in August.
Ugandan officials claimed that the patient had recently been in the DRC, where the outbreak is still spreading, but the World Health Organization and Africa’s top health agency said on Thursday that they had not received confirmed information that the woman had traveled there.
The Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs had on Thursday told Reuters that the woman was believed to have contracted Ebola while traveling in Uganda.
Ugandan government spokesperson Alan Kasujja told Reuters on Thursday that Uganda had no Ebola cases and that if it did, it would make that information public.
REUTERS