Dr. Stella Ameyo Adadevoh, one of the country’s best consultant physicians, who had contracted the dreaded Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) from the index carrier, Patrick Sawyer, an American, who imported the virus from Liberia into Nigeria, is dead at the age of 58.
Adadevoh who worked at First Consultants Medical Centre, a Lagos-based hospital, where Patrick Sawyer, was admitted was said to have passed on Tuesday evening after all efforts to revive her from coma failed. Her sad death brings the total number of deaths from the Ebola virus to five in Nigeria since it first broke in July 2014 in Lagos.
Dr. Adadevoh was recently discharged after reportedly surviving the disease but she later came down with sickness and relapsed into coma.
Adadevoh who was a great granddaughter of Herbert Macaulay succumbed to the disease having been in a coma for some days. The mother of one son had led the medical team at First Consultants Medical Centre, a Lagos-based hospital, which treated Sawyer on his arrival in Lagos.
As the head of operations at First Consultants, Adadevoh was praised for being the first to detect that Sawyer, who was admitted at First Consultants for five days before his death, was not being truthful when he denied that he was infected with the Ebola virus.
After he had tested negative for malaria and other diseases, she was said to have ordered that his blood be tested for Ebola. It was the positive result of the test that enabled the hospital to contact the Lagos State health authorities about the first Ebola patient in the country.
Her death brings to five, including the index case Sawyer, the total number of persons who have succumbed to the scourge of the disease in Nigeria.
Adedavoh is the first doctor and the fourth Nigerian to have died from the virus. Others who died before her comprised two nurses and the ECOWAS protocol officer, Jatto Abdulqudir, who picked up Sawyer, described by President Goodluck Jonathan as ‘a mad man’ from the Murtala Muhammad International Airport (MMIA), Lagos.
However, five others who contracted the disease from Sawyer have been discharged while two others remain in the isolation ward at the Infectious Disease Hospital, Yaba, Lagos.
Her father, the late Dr. Babatunde Kwaku Adadevoh, was a renowned Harvard University-trained physician and former vice-chancellor of the University of Lagos, while her grandmother was the daughter of Sir Herbert Samuel Macaulay, a foremost politician and founder of Nigerian nationalism in the early 1940s.
