Guinea’s Ebola outbreak leads to testing in Liberia…”rapidly evolving”

Wednesday, March 26, 2014
By Paul Martin

Lisa Schnirring
CIDRAP News
Mar 25, 2014

In what the World Health Organization (WHO) has called a rapidly evolving Ebola virus outbreak in Guinea, sick patients in neighboring Liberia are being tested, and officials today ruled out an Ebola infection in a Canadian traveler who had recently visited West Africa.

The count of lab-confirmed cases in Guinea stayed at 13, as reported by the WHO late yesterday, with the numbers of suspected cases and deaths also remaining the same at 86 and 59, the WHO said in a note e-mailed to the media today.

WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl said in a Twitter post today that many different diseases produce symptoms similar to Ebola and other viral hemorrhagic fevers and that some cases will undoubtedly be ruled out.

Six of seven blood samples had tested positive for the virus at the Pasteur Institute in Lyon, France, and seven other cases were confirmed at a Pasteur Institute lab deployed from Dakar, Senegal.

Tests have confirmed that that the subtype involved in the outbreak is Zaire, the WHO said. Earlier tests on a gene segment from one of the samples initially suggested the outbreak likely involved the Zaire subtype, which has a mortality rate as high as 90%.

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