Ebola: Senate Seeks Emergency Funding, Mandatory Screening At All Entry Points
It also called for the replacement of the Quarantine Act of 1926 with a modern public health law aligned with the International Health Regulations of 2005. The post Ebola: Senate Seeks Emergency Funding, Mandatory…
Nigeria's history with Ebola dates back to the 2014 outbreak, when the country recorded a handful of cases and deaths after an infected traveller arrived in Lagos, but was controlled relatively quickly through aggressive contact tracing led by health authorities. That episode is often cited as a rare African public health success story, but it also exposed how thinly stretched Nigeria's disease surveillance and border health infrastructure were, especially given the Quarantine Act of 1926 — a colonial-era law that has long been criticised as outdated and ill-suited to modern disease control, including the lack of clear legal backing for quarantine enforcement, data sharing, and emergency response funding.
The Senate's latest intervention points to a renewed outbreak concern, with lawmakers pushing for mandatory temperature and symptom checks at Nigeria's airports, land borders and seaports, alongside emergency funding and a replacement for the 1926 law to bring it in line with the WHO's International Health Regulations of 2005. All three reports agree on the core asks — emergency funds, mandatory entry-point screening and legal reform — while details such as the scale of funding, implementation timeline, and which agency would lead enforcement have not yet been specified.