Health care officials in Sweden say a patient who was admitted to a hospital with a suspected case of Ebola was found not to be suffering from the highly infectious and potentially deadly disease after all.
The male patient, whose identity has not been revealed, had recently returned to Sweden from a trip to Burundi and was exhibiting symptoms of hemorrhagic fever.
He was originally admitted to the emergency ward of a hospital in Enkoping, about 80 kilometers (50 miles) north of Stockholm, but was later transferred to the larger Uppsala University Hospital.
Ebola, other diseases ruled out
Health officials said Friday that the man’s condition had improved and that tests had ruled out Ebola as well as other diseases such as Marburg and dengue fever. They said they would continue to run further tests to figure out what the man was suffering from.
Health officials said people in contact with the patient who had been kept in isolation were now free to go home.
There is currently no known Ebola outbreak in Burundi, but the country borders the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which has been battling an Ebola outbreak for almost six months. More than 350 people have died in that outbreak.
Ebola is a hemorrhagic fever that causes internal bleeding and potentially death. It is rapidly spread via contact with the bodily fluids of those infected.
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