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The hospital in Enköping which has received a case of suspected Ebola Fredrik Sandberg/TT via PA Images
All Clear

Man admitted to hospital in Sweden with suspected Ebola found not to have disease

The man had recently returned from a trip in Burundi.

LAST UPDATE | Jan 4th 2019, 9:25 PM

A PATIENT IN Sweden who was admitted to hospital with a suspected case of Ebola, was found not to be suffering from the highly infectious and potentially fatal disease, health care officials said this evening.

“The young man… who had symptoms… is not suffering from Ebola. That is what the result of tests shows,” the health authorities in Uppsala, about 70 kilometres north of Stockholm, said in a statement.

“The patient came in this morning. He was throwing up blood and had bloody stools,” which can be a symptom of Ebola, Mikael Kohler, a medical director for Uppsala Region, told AFP earlier.

The young man, whose identity has not been released, lives in Sweden and had returned from a trip to Burundi three weeks ago but was not known to have visited any Ebola-contaminated area, Kohler said.

The symptoms first appeared this morning.

After the patient was admitted to hospital, the emergency room of that hospital was closed, and staff who came in contact with the patient were being cared for, authorities said earlier. 

Ebola is one of the world’s most notorious diseases, being both highly infectious and extremely lethal.

It is caused by a virus that has a natural reservoir in the bat, which does not itself fall ill, but can pass the microbe on to humans who hunt it for “bushmeat”.

The virus is handed on by contact with bodily fluids – touching a sick or dead person is a well-known source of infection.

Following an incubation period of between two and 21 days, Ebola develops into a high fever, weakness, intense muscle and joint pain, headaches and a sore throat.

That is often followed by vomiting and diarrhoea, skin eruptions, kidney and liver failure, and internal and external bleeding.

The worst-ever Ebola outbreak started in December 2013 in southern Guinea before spreading to two neighbouring west African countries, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

That outbreak killed more than 11,300 people out of nearly 29,000 registered cases, according to WHO estimates, although the real figure is thought to be significantly higher.

An Ebola outbreak ravaging eastern areas of the Democratic Republic of Congo has claimed several hundred lives.

It is the 10th such outbreak in the Congo since the disease was first detected there in 1976.

© AFP 2019

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