WHO: Nigeria’s Ebola outbreak is officially over

ABUJA, Nigeria — Nigeria is free of Ebola, the World Health Organization declared Monday, a rare victory in the months-long battle against the fatal disease.

Nigeria’s containment of Ebola is a “spectacular success story,” WHO’s director for Nigeria, Rui Gama Vaz, said at a news conference in the capital, Abuja.

The disease came to Lagos, Africa’s most populous city, through an airline passenger who had carried Ebola from Liberia to Nigeria. The July 23 announcement about the disease hitting Nigeria “rocked public health communities all around the world,” the WHO said in a statement.

Many feared the worst in an urban sprawl characterized by large populations living in crowded and unsanitary conditions in many slums. Lagos’ population of about 21 million people is nearly the combined populations of the infected countries of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, the statement said.

Health officials reached every single known person to have contact with infected people in Lagos and 99.8 percent in Port Harcourt, Nigeria’s oil capital where the disease was carried by an infected Nigerian diplomat.

With 18,500 visits to 894 contacts, health workers tracked the progress of all who had come in contact with the disease.

In the end, Nigeria suffered 20 cases of Ebola and eight deaths, including two doctors and a nurse.