Kenya records its first Ebola case, imported from Congo's largest-ever outbreak, and the patient has died

Kenya has confirmed its first case of Ebola, and the patient is already dead. The case was a Kenyan citizen who had been living in the Democratic Republic of Congo and arrived in Nairobi on Saturday, health minister Aden Duale told a press conference on Tuesday. Twenty-eight contacts have been identified so far, including family members and health workers, and are being traced. The case is an import, but the export tells the real story. Congo is battling its largest-ever Ebola outbreak, caused by the rare Bundibugyo species. The outbreak was formally declared in mid-May, but may have started months earlier, and it has resisted every containment effort. More than 8,000 cases have been recorded and over 4,000 people have died. Those numbers describe a health system failure on a continental scale: an outbreak smouldering undetected for months, then exploding past the capacity of the response. The virus has already crossed one border. It spread to Uganda, which reported 20 cases and two deaths before the World Health Organization declared it free of the disease in August. Now it has crossed a second. Ebola spreads through direct contact with the bodily fluids of infected people, living or dead, and causes fever, vomiting and diarrhoea, and in severe cases internal and external bleeding. It is not airborne, but it is unforgiving of weak surveillance, and weak surveillance is what the region has had. Kenya says it is prepared. More than 140,000 travellers from affected areas have been screened and over 100 alerts investigated, all returning negative for Ebola, according to health authorities. Quarantine and isolation facilities have been set up as a precaution. Officials warned that previous African Ebola outbreaks cost billions of dollars in lost travel, trade, tourism and investment, arguing that early preparation is cheaper than a full-scale response. That is true, and it is also an indictment: the money was not spent in Congo in May, or in the months before the declaration when the virus was already moving. A Kenyan citizen now lies dead in Nairobi because an outbreak was allowed to burn, undetected and under-resourced, in the country next door. The region's governments will now spend on fire engines. The fire was preventable.