A 9-year old boy apparently died of a blood transfusion in Eastern Sierra Leone.
(Reuters) - Sierra Leone’s eastern district of Kailahun, once a hotbed of Ebola, has recorded its first case in nearly four months, threatening progress made to stamp out the disease, officials said on Saturday.
A 9-month-old boy tested positive for Ebola after dying in Kailahun, the district on Guinea’s border that recorded Sierra Leone’s first Ebola case last May and was for months the epicenter of the crisis.
Kailahun went from recording up to 80 infections per week in June to zero cases at the end of last year. Nearly 3,800 people have died of Ebola in Sierra Leone but numbers of weekly cases are falling as steps to control the disease take hold.
However, Winnie Romeril, a spokeswoman for the World Health Organisation, said local and foreign experts had been dispatched to investigate the case after the positive test result.
Alex Bonapha, the Kailahun district council chairman, said it was not clear how the boy may have contracted Ebola as both his parents were healthy.
He said the boy may have gotten the disease during a blood transfusion or there may have been a problem with the sample that was tested.
Sources at the Nixon Hospital in Kailahun District confirmed that the boy underwent a blood transfusion before dying.
“I am aware of the weakness in the health system which means that the blood transfused into the baby could well not have been the blood that had been donated by his uncle,” Bonapha said.
A ministry of health official expressed serious concern over the case, which came as the focus of local and international health officials is on the north and west of the country, the latest areas affected by Ebola.
Liberia, once the hardest hit of all the countries in West Africa, has detected no Ebola cases after the last confirmed patient died at the end of March.
However, Guinea has imposed a 45-day state of health emergency to tackle a spike of cases in the country where the outbreak was first confirmed last year.
As part of these measures, authorities closed all private medical clinics in Kindia, 135 km (84 miles) from the capital Conakry, after a new case of Ebola was recorded there.
The worst Ebola outbreak on record has now killed nearly 10,500 people, mainly in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.
I haven’t found any updates to the following.
We should have heard of something this past week end.
Patient evaluated for Ebola at Colorado hospital after seeing symptoms
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/04/02/us-health-ebola-colorado-idUSKBN0MT0TO20150402
Apr 2, 2015
A patient was being evaluated for Ebola in isolation at a Colorado hospital on Thursday after experiencing symptoms of the disease, health officials said.
The patient, who was not identified and was considered low-risk, had recently traveled to an Ebola-affected country and was taken to the Medical Center of the Rockies some 50 miles (80 km) north of Denver on Wednesday evening after falling ill, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment said in a statement.
The department expected test results to be known later on Thursday morning, the statement said, adding that the person was also being tested for other conditions.
Further details on the patient were not immediately provided.
At least 10 people are known to have been treated for Ebola in the United States - four of them diagnosed with the disease on U.S. soil - during a West African epidemic that has killed more than 10,000 people, mostly in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, over the last year.
Only two people are known to have contracted the virus in the United States - both of them nurses who treated an Ebola patient from Liberia who became sick while visiting Dallas. That man, Thomas Duncan, died in October.
(Reporting by Curtis Skinner in San Francisco; Editing by Kevin Liffey)