A UN employee who was infected with Ebola while working in Liberia has died in Germany, the hospital treating him said Tuesday.
“Despite intensive medical measures and the greatest efforts of the medical staff, the 56-year-old UN employee has succumbed to this serious infectious disease,” St George hospital, in the eastern city of Leipzig, said in a statement.
He had arrived on October 9 in a modified Gulfstream jet equipped with an isolation chamber and was met by a medical team in biohazard suits and two ambulances. Hospital staff had characterized his condition as “highly critical, but stable” when he arrived.
A spokesman for the city said the deceased will be cremated immediately.
The decision to cremate rather than bury him follows the mandatory protocol of Germany’s Robert Koch Institute (RKI), Germany’s central disease control and prevention center.
The victim, originally from Sudan, was Muslim.
“That doesn’t make it easier, because Islam does not allow for a cremation,” the city spokesman said.
Another Ebola patient, from Uganda, remains in a hospital in Frankfurt, and a third, from Senegal, was released in good health from a Hamburg clinic after five weeks’ treatment.
Communities in West Africa have broadly been implementing measures to slow down the spread of Ebola, but not enough is being done to actually stop the outbreak, a senior World Health Organization (WHO) official said in Geneva.
The number of Ebola cases in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone has risen above 8,900 and will surpass 9,000 this week, assistant director general Bruce Aylward said.
More than 4,400 people have died in these three countries at the centre of the epidemic.
The number of new cases has risen by 1,000 per week over the past few weeks, but that could be at least partially due to slow reporting, Aylward said.
“It’s too early to say” whether the haemorraghic fever is no longer spreading at an exponential rate, he added.
However, he said the WHO has been receiving information from the affected areas suggesting that the slowdown may be due to safer burial practices and better management of new cases.
At the same time, he stressed that it would be impossible to stop the spread unless there is improvement in tracing infection paths throughout communities and isolating new patients immediately.
“Those pieces are not systematically in place,” Aylward said.
He added that he was concerned that Ebola has been reaching additional districts in the three West African countries, and that it is spreading fast in the densely populated capitals there.
Meanwhile, Norwegian Foreign Minister Borge Brende was screened for fever on arrival in Liberia’s capital, Monrovia, before being allowed into the West African country, reports said.
During his day-long stay, Brende is set to visit a clinic being built to treat Ebola patients and meet with local health workers and officials.
“I have prepared myself and have had a security briefing before arriving.” Brende told Norwegian news agency NTB.
Brende added that he had learned to avoid shaking hands when greeting people.
GNA
