In Fight to Stop Ebola, Nigeria Got Right Everything America Got Wrong

Africa's most-populous country, Nigeria, which had 20 Ebola cases and eight deaths. Lagos, with some 21 million residents, is the continent's biggest city.

In addition, 49 percent of Lagos state's population lives in poverty in slums with little sanitation. Making matters worse is that doctors discovered an Ebola case in Port Harcourt, another extremely poor area where the majority of people live in shanties with almost nonexistent sanitation (keep in mind, the disease is spread by bodily fluids).

And it was not just lives at risk. As FP reported in August, an outbreak in Nigeria had the potential to devastate West Africa's economy. 

 The WHO called it a "spectacular success story" that prevented "potentially the most explosive Ebola outbreak imaginable." 

ccording to the WHO, the public-health community knew an outbreak in Nigeria was a potential disaster. As soon the first case was discovered, the WHO, the CDC, and other government officials "reached 100 percent of known contacts in Lagos and 99.8 percent at the second outbreak site, in Port Harcourt, Nigeria's oil hub."

Isolation wards were then created, followed by treatment facilities. People who tried to escape were digitally tracked and returned to isolation. Doctors Without Borders and the WHO quickly trained local doctors to treat the disease. And while Nigeria's public-health system is poor, it's not nonexistent; aid groups have been working to eradicate polio there for years.

In an interview with Time magazine, Faisal Shuaib, a doctor at Nigeria's Ebola Emergency Operation Center, also said that stopping public panic was instrumental.

"People began to realize that contracting Ebola was not necessarily a death sentence," Shuaib said. "Emphasizing that reporting early to the hospital boosts survival gave comfort that [a person] has some level of control over the disease prognosis." Shuaib added that keeping Nigerian borders open -- the opposite of a strategy being thrown around in Washington right now -- helped to contain panic.

On the other hand, the United States has done almost the complete opposite of Nigeria. It took 11 days to diagnose Thomas Eric Duncan with Ebola after he was turned away from a hospital six days after the Liberian's arrival in Dallas.

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