Posted on 12/30/2003 4:03:30 PM PST by Indy Pendance
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (AP) -- Laboratory tests have ruled out the possibility that an Angolan trader died of the feared Ebola virus in neighboring Zimbabwe, the U.N. health agency said Tuesday.
The South African National Institute for Communicable Diseases tested samples sent by Zimbabwe on Tuesday, World Health Organization spokesman Dr. Welile Shashas said.
"To the immense relief of everyone, this was not Ebola" or a similar hemorrhagic fever, he said.
Zimbabwe health authorities announced over the weekend that an Angolan national who died in the resort town of Victoria Falls on Christmas day had exhibited symptoms consistent with Ebola.
The announcement touched off fears the highly contagious disease could spread from the continent's equatorial regions to southern Africa for the first time.
Health officials in neighboring Botswana, Namibia and Zambia have been on alert since the weekend.
The actual cause of death remains to be determined. But confirmation that it was not Ebola has allowed emergency health teams gathered at Victoria Falls to lift quarantine restrictions imposed on staff who tended to the patient, Shashas said.
Ebola, one of the world's deadliest viral diseases, causes extensive internal bleeding and rapid death in up to 90 percent of those infected.
The virus has killed more than 1,000 people since it was first identified in 1976 in western Sudan and in a region of Congo. An outbreak in a remote part of Republic of Congo has killed at least 29 people so far, according to WHO.
The spread of which are just another two by-products of the farm invasions.
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