Nigeria Centre for Disease Control and Prevention Director-General Dr. Jide Idris has acknowledged that the country is not fully prepared for a potential Ebola outbreak but expressed confidence that existing knowledge and systems would be sufficient to detect, contain, and prevent the spread of the disease if it entered the country’s borders.

Speaking in Lagos amid concern over Ebola outbreaks in parts of East and Central Africa, Idris said a recent assessment placed Nigeria’s preparedness level at approximately 59 percent, a figure he described as variable and subject to constant improvement. He said no country, including the United States, could claim 100 percent preparedness for such a disease, and that the goal was continuous improvement rather than a static target.

He said Nigeria remained vulnerable to Ebola importation because of the volume of international travel, migration, and the country’s extensive land borders, and that the NCDC was not relenting in surveillance and preparedness efforts. The commission had deployed advisers to states across the federation to assess readiness, covering emergency operations centers, isolation facilities, laboratory capacity, and critical medical supply availability. Monitoring at airports and other points of entry had also been stepped up while efforts continued to strengthen surveillance at land borders.

Idris said Nigeria’s successful containment of Ebola in 2014, when the country earned global recognition for halting a potential outbreak through aggressive contact tracing, surveillance, and isolation after an infected traveler arrived in Lagos from Liberia, provided invaluable institutional knowledge and systems that could be deployed again if necessary. He said the commission was collaborating with state governments and international partners to improve preparedness and that the focus was ensuring any case was detected quickly, contained rapidly, and prevented from spreading.