No official report yet on Filipino suspected of Ebola in Togo

DFA spokesman Charles Jose. INQUIRER.net FILE PHOTO

MANILA, Philippines—The Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) has yet to receive official reports about a Filipino sailor contracting the Ebola virus in the West African country of Togo.

Foreign Affairs Spokesman Charles Jose said the DFA was still verifying a report by Reuters quoting Togo health officials that two suspected cases of Ebola involving a Filipino sailor and a Togolese national were being tested.

A local Togo news website reported that the Filipino, a 32 year old sailor, arrived at Togo’s capital of Lome already suffering from bleeding and vomiting.

The Togolese national, a student, had reportedly just returned from a pilgrimage in Sierra Leone, one of the four countries where Ebola has been spreading. The student reportedly did not visit the regions afflicted with the Ebola epidemic but showed symptoms of the virus.

Both are being monitored in an isolation center in a hospital, the report said.

A security man reads a local newspaper with a portrait of a doctor, Ameyo Stella Adadevoh, a senior consultant endocrinologist, who died in an isolation facility in Lagos, Nigeria, Wednesday, Aug. 20, 2014. Nigeria’s health minister, Onyebuchi Chukwu, said Tuesday that a fifth person had died of the disease in that country. All of Nigeria’s reported cases so far have been people who had direct contact with a Liberian-American man who was already infected when he arrived in the country on an airliner. (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba)

The World Health Organization (WHO) has recorded nearly 2,500 cases of Ebola virus in the West African countries of Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone.

At least 1,350 casualties have been recorded in the worst ever Ebola outbreak in history.

“In the current outbreak, the majority of Ebola virus disease (EVD) cases are a result of human-to-human transmission and failure to apply appropriate infection prevention and control measures in home care, some clinical settings, and in burial rituals,” WHO said in its August 20 Disease Outbreak News.

“It is important to understand that (Ebola virus) is not an airborne disease. Individuals may become infected as a result of contact with the bodily fluids (vomit, diarrhoea, sputum, blood, etc.) from persons who are confirmed to have EVD or who have died from EVD,” it said.

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