Patient given Ebola all-clear
Tests have found a woman at the centre of a Perth Ebola scare has not contracted the deadly virus.
The woman, believed to be aged in her 60s, was admitted to Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital – which is designated the tropical diseases hospital – and placed in an isolation ward while awaiting her test results, which this afternoon came back negative.
A North Metro Health Service spokesperson said: “The patient has been released from quarantine and is no longer a suspected case of Ebola. No further information will be released about the patient".
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The woman arrived from Kalgoorlie and is believed to have spent time in West Africa at a conference.
Australian Medical Association WA spokesman Dave Mountain earlier said the likelihood that the case was confirmed was very low because many people returned from West Africa with viral-type illnesses including diarrhoea, malaria and yellow fever.
“There’s all sorts of other diseases you can have so it may well not be Ebola,” he said.
SCGH had had at least one other suspected case present so this was not its first and people were being urged “to keep a sense of perspective” about the incident "until any confirmation is received", a hospital spokesperson said.
The spokesperson said the hospital could confirm it had one patient who was currently being tested for Ebola and appropriate precautions were being taken until the patient’s illness was diagnosed.
"For reasons of patient confidentiality, no further information can be provided about the patient," the spokesperson said.
"It is important to note that WA is collaborating closely with other States and Territories and the Commonwealth, via the Communicable Diseases Network Australia, to ensure a co-ordinated risk assessment and response to Ebola virus disease in Australia."
The spokesperson said that at present, the risk of people with Ebola travelling to Australia was considered very low.
"Even if travellers from West Africa did develop Ebola virus disease after arrival in WA, or elsewhere in Australia, our standard of care and infection control is such that once the disease was diagnosed there would be a very low risk of transmission to other persons," the spokesperson said.
Dr Mountain said the virus was “actually quite hard to catch”.
“In countries with poor public health standards where it’s difficult to keep things clean and keep out of the way of contaminants then you get high pick-up rates, but in a western developed country like Australia, the likelihood of passing on the virus is pretty low,” he said.
Ebola is a tropical virus that causes a severe haemorrhagic fever.
“It starts off with 7-10 days of flu-like illnesses and people gradually get worse and eventually it causes what’s called a haemorrhagic fever where people tend to bleed to death from internal bleeding as the virus causes a breakdown, particularly in the blood vessels,” Dr Mountain said.
Australian Medical Association WA spokesman Dave Mountain said the likelihood that the case was confirmed was very low because many people returned from West Africa with viral-type illnesses including diarrhoea, malaria and yellow fever.
“There’s all sorts of other diseases you can have so it may well not be Ebola,” he said.
Dr Mountain said the virus was “actually quite hard to catch”.
“In countries with poor public health standards where it’s difficult to keep things clean and keep out of the way of contaminants then you get high pick-up rates, but in a western developed country like Australia, the likelihood of passing on the virus is pretty low,” he said.
The latest possible case comes after a baby who had recently returned to Melbourne from West Africa was suspected of having Ebola this week.
A Gold Coast man was also cleared of having contracted the deadly virus earlier this month after falling ill upon returning from the Democratic Republic of Congo in central Africa.
Curtin University infectious diseases expert Charles Watson said any travellers who developed fever and other flu-like symptoms within 24 hours of returning from West Africa should be tested for Ebola.
But the risk of any confirmed Ebola case spreading in an Australian city was “unimaginably low”.
Professor Watson said the two aid workers who recently returned to the US with Ebola and were released from hospital after being treated with an experimental drug showed how the virus could be effectively contained in a modern health system.
“They were cared for under strict infection control guidelines and we can do that quite easily in Australia,” Professor Watson told ABC radio.
St John Ambulance WA agreed the likelihood of an Ebola outbreak in Australia was extremely low but said it had reinforced its infectious diseases protocol in response to the virus.
It said patients with the illness had travelled from Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea or Nigeria in the past 21 days, had contact with a confirmed Ebola case or Ebola infected material, and a fever of or above 38C.
The Ebola outbreak in West Africa has claimed more than 2800 lives and infected more than 5800 people, primarily in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
