A team of ​leading Ebola scientists will travel to Nigeria to help investigate how the country’s first patient in more than ‌a decade got infected, Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director-General Jean Kaseya said.

Their task will involve trying to work out how the female patient, the Ugandan-born wife of a Swiss diplomat based in Abuja, caught the Bundibugyo species of Ebola. Her travel documents show she had not visited the outbreak epicentre in Democratic Republic ​of Congo DRC), Kaseya said in an interview with Reuters in London.

Finding out how she became ill matters to ensure ​that the deadly Bundibugyo outbreak, already the second-largest Ebola epidemic on record, is not spreading silently ⁠in as-yet undiscovered locations, and to help trace and isolate all contacts.

“We have so many unknowns,” said Kaseya. “I’m bringing a ​group of scientists in Abuja because, we need to be led by science.”

One of the theories the scientists will investigate is a ​potential link between the patient in Nigeria and the first case in Kenya, reported earlier this month in a man who had travelled from DRC.

On Friday, genomic sequencing showed that the viruses that infected the two patients were closely related.

The patient in Nigeria had been on holiday in Uganda and ​travelled through Entebbe Airport on October 3.

The patient in Kenya, who has since died, was likely in the airport at ​the same time, as their flights were around 40 minutes apart, although they did not depart from the same gate and it is not ‌clear ⁠whether they had any contact, Kaseya said.

–Reuters–