A man who contracted Ebola in Nigeria evaded surveillance and infected a doctor who later died, health authorities say.
The patient contracted the disease after coming into contact with a traveller from Liberia and infected the medic later in southern Nigeria.
The death was the first in Nigeria outside Lagos, the commercial capital. The incident raises the number of confirmed cases in the country to 15, including six deaths.
Health minister Onyebuchi Chukwu told reporters the man who evaded surveillance has recovered and is being watched in Lagos.
The wife of the doctor who treated him in Port Harcourt is also now being quarantined after she developed symptoms of the deadly disease.
The man is a worker at the Economic Community Of West African States, who was a primary contact of Liberian-American Patrick Sawyer. He flew into Lagos last month and died of Ebola.
The man who fled recovered after the late doctor treated him but the doctor died on Friday in Port Harcourt and has not been buried yet, the minister said.
He added that mortuary staff who embalmed the doctor are among 70 people now under surveillance in Port Harcourt, the capital of Rivers state and a hub for Nigeria’s oil industry.
Nigeria does not share land borders with the three other Ebola-affected countries – Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea – and the first case arrived in Lagos by air.
The disease has killed more than 1,400 people in Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone. Doctors Without Borders has warned that the tremendous influx of patients in Liberia, in particular, is overwhelming treatment centres.