- An American Ebola patient landed in Frankfurt and was transferred overnight to the city university hospital for treatment.
- WHO said the man was a humanitarian worker from Bunia in Ituri province, the epicentre of the outbreak.
- DRC declared its 17th Ebola outbreak, Bundibugyo strain with no vaccine or cure, over 1,900 cases and more than 700 deaths.
An American Ebola patient has arrived in Germany for treatment, the health ministry in Berlin said on Monday, weeks after another US citizen infected with Ebola was treated in Berlin.
The patient landed in Frankfurt overnight and was transferred to the city’s university hospital, the ministry said. The head of the World Health Organization said the man was a “humanitarian worker” who had been in Bunia, the capital of the northeastern Ituri province of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
Ituri is the epicentre of the outbreak.
The WHO had provided him with “clinical care and close monitoring”, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on X. “The patient has been safely transferred to Germany for continued follow-up care,” he added.
The DRC declared its 17th Ebola outbreak in mid-May, caused by the Bundibugyo strain of the virus for which there is no vaccine or cure.
There have been over 1,900 confirmed cases in the current outbreak and more than 700 confirmed deaths, according to the WHO.
The ministry said the US patient represented “no danger for the general population or for other patients” in the Frankfurt hospital. “The risk of someone infected with Ebola entering Germany is very low,” the ministry said.
It added that US authorities had requested help from Germany because of the country’s expertise in treating Ebola cases and the shorter flight time from the DRC to Germany.
Another US patient with the virus was quarantined at the end of May along with his family at Berlin’s Charite Hospital. He made a recovery after two weeks of treatment
