A UN medical official who caught Ebola while working in Liberia has died in the German hospital where he was being treated, the clinic in Leipzig said today.
“The patient sick with Ebola fever died during the night in St. Georg Clinic in Leipzig. Despite intensive medical measures and maximum efforts by the medical team, the 56-year-old UN employee succumbed to the serious infectious disease,” it said.
The man, who has not been named, was the third Ebola patient to be flown to Germany for treatment.
The first patient, a Senegalese man infected with Ebola while working for the World Health Organisation (WHO) in Sierra Leone, was taken to a Hamburg hospital in late August for treatment.
He was discharged on October 3rd after recovering and returned to his home country, the hospital said.
Another patient, a Ugandan man who worked for an Italian aid group in West Africa, is undergoing treatment in a Frankfurt hospital.
The WHO said yesterday that the Ebola outbreak in West Africa was the most severe acute public health emergency in modern times.
Dr. Margaret Chan, the director general of the WHO, who dealt with the 2009 avian flu pandemic and the SARS outbreaks of 2002-03, said the Ebola outbreak had progressed from a public health crisis to “a crisis for international peace and security.“
“I have never seen a health event threaten the very survival of societies and governments in already very poor countries,” she said in a statement delivered on her behalf to a conference in Manila, Philippines, and released by her office in Geneva.
“I have never seen an infectious disease contribute so strongly to potential state failure.”
More than 4,000 people have died from the Ebola virus, all but a handful of them in the West African nations of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, according to WHO estimates issued last week. Ms Chan declined to expand on those figures because they were still rising “exponentially.”
Meanwhile, passengers arriving at London’s Heathrow airport today were being screened for Ebola as the UK stepped up measures for combating the disease, with plans to allow direct flights to afflicted parts of Africa scrapped.
Targeted screening of a “low number” of passengers began at Heathrow’s Terminal 1, which handles 85 per cent of travelers to Europe’s busiest hub from Ebola-affected states.
Checks including temperature readings are being carried out by the government agency Public Health England, the airport said.