Nigeria's Ebola patient is a diplomat now in multi organ failure, the strain matches the Congo outbreak, and her contacts are barred from flying for 21 days

The laboratory work is done, and it gave Nigeria the answer it did not want. "We did three levels of tests, but all molecular. The strain was Bundibugyo," said Olajumoke Babatunde, director of the public health laboratory service at the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control and Prevention. The World Health Organization confirmed the same finding. Bundibugyo is the strain driving the epidemic in the Democratic Republic of Congo, now the deadliest in that country's history, and it has no approved vaccine and no specific treatment.

The patient is a woman diplomat who travelled from Uganda to the capital, Abuja, on October 3. She was tested on October 19 after officials learned of her recent travel, and the positive result was confirmed on October 20. Health Minister Muhammad Ali Pate has said she is in isolation and receiving treatment. An unnamed official said she is a diplomat, did not give her nationality, and said her condition has deteriorated into multi organ failure. Ayoade Alakija, a Nigerian physician who co chairs a G7 committee on investment in global health, noted that about 12 days passed between the onset of her illness and her testing, a window in which other people may have been exposed.

The containment net widened on Thursday. Aviation and Aerospace Development Minister Festus Keyamo announced that 46 identified contacts of the patient are restricted from air travel for 21 days, the full incubation window health teams watch. The health authorities had earlier put the contact count at 44 and said those contacts were being monitored. The case makes Nigeria the fourth African country touched by this outbreak. Kenya, in the east, has recorded nine cases since October 6. Uganda recorded about 20 cases earlier in the year, almost all in people who had travelled from Congo, and was declared officially free of the virus in August.

For Nigeria the memory is 2014, when Ebola arrived in Lagos and the country contained it through aggressive tracing. The system that did that work is now being tested in the capital: one imported case, a patient gravely ill, a contact list still being reconciled between agencies, and a strain for which medicine has no vaccine to offer the people on that list, as of October 22.