The Federal Government said it is paying each contact of Nigeria\u2019s confirmed Ebola case N100,000 per week to secure their compliance with quarantine directives.\n<\/p>\n
The Minister of Health and Coordinating Minister of Social Welfare, Prof. Ali Pate, said this to State House correspondents after Wednesday\u2019s Federal Executive Council meeting in Abuja.\n<\/p>\n
He said the payment was designed to remove the economic disincentive that might otherwise push contacts to evade isolation and potentially trigger community transmission.\n<\/p>\n
\u201cIf they evade quarantine, they go to market. They can transmit it to innocent people out there. So it\u2019s so vital that we get their compliance.<\/p>\n
\u201cMany of them, for instance, somebody who may have driven her from one place to the other, is a contact.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey have a livelihood, and you ask them to stay in quarantine. They have a family,\u201d he said.\n<\/p>\n
The minister described the single confirmed case as \u201ca significant wake-up call,\u201d stressing that the government\u2019s overriding objective was containment before the virus could reach the general population.<\/p>\n
He stated, \u201cThe purpose of our measures is to ensure that her primary contacts, those she met once she became symptomatic, at the clinic, in the hospital, are all identified but also quarantined.\u201d <\/p>\n
Pate warned that the financial incentive strategy, while currently viable, would become unworkable if the outbreak were to escalate to community transmission, a scenario he said the government was determined to prevent.\n<\/p>\n
\u201cBy no means will it be applicable if we have the unfortunate situation of community transmission. This is so that we have the maximum defence,\u201d he said.\n<\/p>\n
He contrasted the FG\u2019s containment strategy with the situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where thousands of cases and widespread transmission had made targeted quarantine financially and logistically impractical.\n<\/p>\n
He argued, \u201cIn DRC, where there are thousands of cases, there is transmission in many places. Essentially, they will advise contacts to remain at home.\n<\/p>\n
\u201cThere will be no need, because everybody has it. But here we have been extremely prudent.\u201d\n<\/p>\n
He added that keeping contacts under close monitoring also served an early-detection purpose so that, should any of them test positive, the FG could quickly map and isolate their own secondary contacts before a wider chain of transmission could form.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf one of them is discovered to have contracted the virus, then because they are at hand, we can quickly circumscribe their own contacts so that it doesn\u2019t spread,\u201d he said.\n <\/p>\n
Source: <\/p>\n
The Federal Government said it is paying each contact of Nigeria\u2019s confirmed Ebola case N100,000 per week to secure their compliance with quarantine directives. The Minister of Health and Coordinating… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnigerianews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnigerianews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnigerianews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnigerianews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnigerianews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2631"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/globalnigerianews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2631\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnigerianews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnigerianews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnigerianews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}