DAKAR/PORT HARCOURT, Nigeria: The World Health Organization says it is treating Senegal’s first confirmed Ebola case “as a top priority emergency.”

In a statement distributed Sunday, the WHO said it would address as quickly as possible Senegal’s “urgent need” for support and supplies including personal protective equipment for health workers.

Senegal, a tourist and transportation hub, confirmed its first case of the deadly Ebola disease on Friday, becoming the fifth country in West Africa to be affected by an outbreak that has killed more than 1,500 people.

The patient is a 21-year-old student from Guinea who showed up at a hospital in Dakar on Aug. 26. Authorities in Guinea had lost track of the student and alerted Senegal on Aug. 27 that he may have crossed into Senegal.

The widow of a doctor who died from Ebola in Nigeria’s oil city of Port Harcourt has also tested positive for the virus, the state government said on Sunday.

Rivers State health commissioner Sampson Parker said test results showed the woman had the disease, which claimed the life of her husband, Ike Enemuo, on Aug. 22.

Enemuo fell ill and died after treating an official from the ECOWAS regional bloc who travelled to Port Harcourt after having contact with a Liberian man who brought the virus into Nigeria.

The doctor was the sixth to die from the virus in Nigeria and the first outside Lagos, raising fears about the spread of the hemorrhagic fever just as it was thought to have been contained.

Sampson said three patients, another doctor, a pharmacist and a woman who had contact with Enemuo at the hospital where he died, had been taken to a specialist treatment centre outside the city. Enemuo’s widow was at an isolation unit in Lagos, he added.

“They have not been confirmed (as having Ebola) and we are waiting for the result of the investigation,” he told a news conference.

Some 200 primary and secondary contacts have been traced, although about 60 had yet to be spoken to, he added. None of them had shown symptoms, he said.