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4 Jan, 2019 16:34

Swedish hospital on lockdown after report of suspected Ebola case

Swedish hospital on lockdown after report of suspected Ebola case

A man is being treated in isolation in Sweden’s Uppsala University Hospital, after returning from a trip to Africa vomiting blood. Hospital authorities are concerned that the patient may have Ebola.

The man was transferred to an infection clinic in the Uppsala hospital on Friday, after checking himself into a hospital in nearby Enkoping several hours earlier. The hospital in Enkoping shut down its emergency room and monitored its staff after the patient displayed symptoms of Ebola.

Doctors in the Uppsala hospital are now awaiting test results to see if their worst suspicions are confirmed. For now though, they remain cautiously optimistic.

“Other diseases are quite possible,” said a statement from medical authorities there.

The man had returned from a trip to the east African country of Burundi several weeks ago. While Burundi is currently not a risk area for the disease, neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo has been grappling with an Ebola outbreak since last summer.

The vast majority of Ebola cases occur in Africa. An outbreak in west Africa between 2014 and 2016 killed an estimated 11,325 people, according to the World Health Organization. Only three confirmed cases were reported in Europe in that time. All three patients were hospitalized and none died.

The highly contagious Ebola virus causes a violent hemorrhagic fever, accompanied by vomiting, diarrhea, internal and external bleeding. The virus kills roughly half of those it infects, with better hospital care dramatically increasing patients’ chances of survival.

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