20th August, 2014
A Nigerian woman was rushed to the hospital and hundreds of people were quarantined after she showed symptoms of Ebola virus infection in a jobcentre in Germany.
As many as 600 visitors and staff at the employment office building in Berlin were also stopped from leaving for several hours as emergency services sealed off part of the street.
One of Germany’s leading newspapers, Bild said the woman had fainted, that she hailed from Nigeria and that she said later that she had recently been in contact with people infected with Ebola.
Several people who had been with the woman inside the building in the north-eastern district of Prenzlauer Berg were later taken to hospital for testing.
Berlin fire department spokesman Rolf Erbe said that because the patient came from “an area affected by a highly contagious disease, we took these precautions”.
He said the testing in the city’s Charite hospital would take some time. “The patient was isolated inside the ambulance, the staff took the appropriate protective measures. An emergency medic, the public health officer, arrived and the necessary precautions were taken,” he added.
A spokesman for the city’s health authority said emergency services were called after the woman turned up at the employment bureau with high fever and collapsed.
West Africa’s Ebola epidemic, which has hit four nations since it broke out in Guinea early this year, is by far the deadliest since the virus was discovered four decades ago in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The World Health Organization said Ebola virus had killed 1,229 globally with four death recorded in Nigeria and 15 cases in total.