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Dr Wessam Mankoula, head of health emergencies at the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, told a media briefing on October 22 that experts are investigating whether the index patients from Nigeria and Kenya had any physical contact while both transited through Entebbe airport on the same day. The Nigerian patient, described as the Ugandan-born wife of a Swiss diplomat based in Abuja, had spent two weeks vacationing in Uganda before flying onward to Nigeria. According to Mankoula, she arrived back in Abuja in early October, with symptoms beginning on October 7 that were initially treated as malaria until Ebola was suspected on October 19 and confirmed the next day.
The Kenyan patient, a man who had lived in the Democratic Republic of Congo for seven years, traveled from Beni in the outbreak zone through Uganda by road to Kampala and then to Entebbe before boarding a Jambojet flight to Nairobi on October 3, Reuters reported. He arrived at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport at 1:10 p.m. and was driven directly to Nairobi Hospital by a relative, where he died two days later on October 5 after exhibiting fever, muscle pain, sore throat and bleeding, according to Africa CDC data. Kenyan authorities have since identified multiple contacts, with eight secondary cases confirmed among family members and health workers who have all been placed in quarantine.
Nigeria is tracing 44 contacts linked to its first case, a figure provided by national health officials in coordination with the Africa CDC. The Nigerian patient was admitted to a health facility on October 11 before testing positive for the Bundibugyo species of Ebola, which has no approved vaccine or specific treatment, according to a Health Policy Watch assessment of the briefing. Mankoula emphasized that investigations continue into multiple possible infection routes for the Nigerian woman, who had no reported travel to Congo.
The cases form part of a wider Ebola surge in the Democratic Republic of Congo that the World Health Organization has tallied at more than 8,400 infections with over 4,000 deaths as of early October. Uganda, which recorded 20 cases earlier in 2026 before declaring itself free of the disease in August, now faces questions over how the Kenyan patient moved undetected across its territory and through its airport screening, a Washington Post dispatch noted. Officials from Kenya, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo are collaborating on contact tracing that has already expanded to dozens of individuals across borders.
Kenya has screened more than 650,000 travelers and tested 267 samples since the outbreak intensified, with only the initial imported case and its secondary transmissions detected so far, according to the Kenyan Ministry of Health. Mankoula cautioned against premature conclusions on the airport encounter, stating in the briefing that “there are a lot of possibilities” and that “a lot of effort is going into the investigation to verify the source of the infection.” The Africa CDC has activated regional response measures while individual countries maintain heightened surveillance at ports of entry to prevent further spread.
