Germany reports first Ebola death

BERLIN — Germany reported its first case of death yesterday from Ebola after a 56-year-old Sudanese aid worker being treated for the disease in the eastern German city of Leipzig died overnight.

The death toll so far from the outbreak, first reported in West Africa in March, has reached 4,447 from a total of 8,914 cases, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) assistant director-general Bruce Aylward said yesterday. Most of the deaths have occurred in the region’s worst-hit countries, including Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

The WHO yesterday also raised the estimated death rate for the disease from around 50 per cent to 70 per cent, calling it a “high mortality disease”.

The aid worker, a United Nations employee who contracted the virus in Liberia, had been treated in an isolation ward in the city’s St Georg hospital since being flown in on Oct 9, clinic spokesman Martin Schmalz said.

He was the third Ebola patient to be treated in Germany. A Senegalese national survived after being treated in August in a Hamburg hospital, while another patient is being treated in Frankfurt.

Although many of the cases have been centred in West Africa, the disease has since spread to countries as far off as the United States and Spain. A Spanish medical team in Madrid is treating a 44-year-old nursing assistant who became the first known case of Ebola infection outside Africa when she was diagnosed a week ago.

Meanwhile, a United States health worker in Dallas has also contracted Ebola after being in contact with an infected patient who died last week. She has received a plasma transfusion donated by a doctor who beat the virus.

The US will, this week, expand stepped-up screenings at airports for passengers who arrive with a fever, the first symptom of an Ebola infection, while the United Kingdom yesterday began screening passengers arriving at London’s Heathrow airport from the worst-hit Ebola-affected countries. Agencies