Ebola outbreak death toll rises to 932 after another 45 patients die.

Nigerian health officials wait to screen passengers at Lagos airport. 

A nurse who treated Nigeria's first Ebola victim has died of the virus in Lagos as five new cases of the highly lethal disease were confirmed in Africa's most populous country.

The nurse had helped care for Patrick Sawyer, a 40-year-old Liberian-American civil servant who last month visited from Liberia, one of three countries in the region hit by the world's biggest epidemic. The five new cases are believed to be other health workers who came into contact with Sawyer, who died within days of his arrival.

The total death toll from the Ebola outbreak has now risen to 932 after another 45 patients died between 2 and 4 August, the World Health Organisation said.

"Yesterday the first known Nigerian to die of Ebola was recorded. This was one of the nurses that attended to the Liberian. The other five [newly confirmed] cases are being treated at an isolation ward," the Nigerian health minister, Onyebuchi Chukwu, told reporters in the capital, Abuja, on Wednesday.

Officials initially downplayed the risk of exposure, saying Sawyer had been immediately isolated when he collapsed on arrival at Lagos's bustling main airport two weeks ago.

But on Tuesday the state health commissioner, Jide Idris, said Ebola was diagnosed only after Sawyer had been taken to hospital and had direct or indirect contact with at least 70 others. They include airline passengers, airport officials and health workers, and have all been placed under precautionary surveillance. Seven have been quarantined.

Officials told reporters they were compiling a list of secondary contacts, and appealed to those who believed they may be at risk to come forward. "This is a call for everyone to be vigilant, especially with regard to relating to people who are ill," Idris said.

The virus has an incubation period of up to 21 days, meaning symptoms do not necessarily show before then. Once transmitted through contact with the bodily fluids of infected persons, meat or surfaces, a fever quickly degenerates into internal and external bleeding, vomiting and diarrhoea, which all contain vast amounts of the pathogen.

A committee has been set up to deal with any potential escalation of the disease, although Nigerian officials admitted there was a shortage of doctors willing to work directly with confirmed cases. "Our doctors are worried about the danger it poses to their lives and the need to be reassured," said Tope Ojo, Lagos chairman of the Nigerian Medical Association.

Doctors and healthcare workers on the frontline have been the hardest hit during the outbreak, which has so far killed 887 people in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Authorities said they were considering applying for an experimental drug used on two Americans to treat the doctor who headed Sawyer's team and is now battling the virus herself.

Other preventive measures have been unveiled across Nigeria. Lagos, a melting pot of 20 million people, has broadcast information on radios and through leaflets, distributed protective clothing to health workers and set up four isolation wards.

In the northern state of Kaduna, officials said corpses from outside the country would require special permission for burial. Two suspected Ebola-infected corpses in the southern states of Anambra and Akwa Ibom are believed to be victims flown in from Guinea. Authorities have sealed the morgues while samples are being tested.

This week, troops were deployed in Sierra Leone and Liberia to help protect medical workers and quarantine the villages at the centre of the epidemic.

The Spanish defence ministry said on Wednesday it had sent a medically equipped Airbus 310 to Liberia to repatriate a Spanish priest who has tested positive for the virus. The priest, Miguel Pajares, is one of three missionaries being kept in isolation at the San Jose de Monrovia hospital in Liberia. The other two infected aid workers were identified as Chantal Pascaline Mutwamene, of Congo, and Paciencia Melgar, from Equatorial Guinea.

Al-Arabiya reported on Wednesday that a Saudi man in hospital in Jeddah with suspected Ebola after a business trip to Sierra Leone had died.

In neighbouring Ivory Coast, a regional athletic contest due to be held this month has been cancelled. "There was really no benefit in holding the games until things are under control. We don't want to trigger hysteria," sports minister Alain Lobognon said.