Two travellers monitored in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro have tested negative for the virus — but the wider outbreak in Central Africa continues to grow.
By IDEA Television Health Desk
Brazilian health authorities have confirmed that two patients suspected of carrying the Ebola virus have both tested negative, bringing a brief but tense episode to a close. The patients — one in São Paulo and one in Rio de Janeiro — had recently returned from African countries at the centre of a rapidly expanding outbreak and presented with symptoms consistent with the disease.
The São Paulo case involved a 37-year-old man who had recently travelled to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). He had been showing fever symptoms and was isolated as a precautionary measure at a specialised infectious disease facility. He subsequently tested positive for meningitis, and Ebola was formally ruled out by state health authorities.
“The risk of the disease being introduced into Brazil and South America remains very low.”
— Brazil’s Health Ministry
The second patient, a Belgian national being monitored in Rio de Janeiro, had recently returned from Uganda — another country affected by the current outbreak — and presented with viral symptoms including cough, chills, and diarrhoea. He tested positive for malaria, and Ebola was subsequently ruled out.
Had either result been positive, it would have marked the first confirmed Ebola infection outside Africa since the current outbreak began. The close monitoring of international travellers reflects mounting global anxiety over what health officials are calling the third-largest Ebola outbreak since the virus was first identified fifty years ago.
The DRC outbreak, declared on 15 May, has grown at an alarming speed. Doctors Without Borders warned this week that no Ebola outbreak has ever recorded so many suspected cases so quickly after its official declaration, and that the true scale of infections is likely far greater than official figures suggest, given that only around 20 percent of contacts are currently being traced. The outbreak has spread across multiple Congolese provinces including Ituri, North Kivu, and South Kivu, where ongoing armed conflict has severely hampered containment efforts.
World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus visited the outbreak epicentre in eastern DRC over the weekend, where he oversaw the opening of a new Ebola treatment centre in Bunia and announced that five patients had recovered — including the first documented recovery of a confirmed case of the Bundibugyo strain since the outbreak began. “Anyone who has it can recover,” Tedros said. “But the rule is that this is everybody’s business.”
