AN ILLUSTRIOUS FAMILY OF NIGERIAN HEROES

The Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) struck at the heart of Nigeria, when Dr. Ameyo Stella Adadevoh, a consultant physician, and member of the illustrious Kwaku Adadevoh/Herbert Macaulay/Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowder lineage succumbed to the scourge of the disease.
Dr. Adadevoh contracted the virus from the Liberian, Mr. Patrick Sawyer, who imported the disease into Nigeria.
Sources close to Dr. Adadevoh, 58, said she succumbed to the disease yesterday evening, having been in a coma for some days.
Dr. Adadevoh, who is survived by 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, Dr. 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.
Among those who have passed on, Dr. 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 an already infected Sawyer 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.
Prior to Dr. Adadevoh's death, her family and colleagues had held a press briefing in Lagos appealing to the US government to intervene to keep her from dying.
They felt that the medical care she was getting in the isolation ward was insufficient and had called on the US government to send the ZMapp trial drug to save her life.
Dr. Adadevoh comes from an illustrious family of physicians, politicians, statesmen and clerics.
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.
Macaulay himself was the grandson of Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther, who was ordained the first African Bishop of the Anglican Church in Nigeria in 1864, making Dr. Ameyo Adadevoh, his great-great-great-grand daughter.
The Adadevoh family can trace their roots to the Creoles in Sierra Leone, Ghana and South-west Nigeria.