Fears Guinea Ebola outbreak has spread to Sierra Leone
By Mouctar Bah
News.Yahoo.com
March 25, 2014
Conakry (AFP) – West Africa was on high alert Tuesday after Sierra Leone warned an Ebola outbreak ravaging Guinea may have crossed its borders and five deaths in Liberia were being tested for the killer virus.
More than 60 people have died of haemorrhagic fever in Guinea since the start of February, with the Ebola virus identified as the cause in 13 of 45 samples tested by scientists.
“We still do not have any confirmed cases of Ebola in the country. What we do have are suspected cases which our health teams are investigating,” Sierra Leone’s chief medical officer Brima Kargbo told reporters.
Kargbo said one of the cases concerned a 14-year-old boy thought to have died two weeks ago in Guinea before being buried in a village on the Sierra Leone border. The second was a patient who was still alive in the northern district of Kambia.
A variety of deadly, highly-contagious tropical bugs, including the Marburg virus and Lassa fever, can lead to similar symptoms — vomiting, diarrhoea and profuse bleeding — but the authorities have not announced which other pathogens have been picked up in samples.
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