A 31-year-old man called for an ambulance on Monday, saying he was feeling unwell, and was taken to hospital in Lodz. A preliminary blood test has not exposed the Ebola virus. A report on the final results is expected to be released soon.
According to Jan Bondar, a spokesman for Poland’s sanitary inspectorate, the patient who lives in the Polish town of Sieradz told medical staff that he had been in Germany where he had come into contact with people from Guinea, in West Africa. At the moment of his being admitted to hospital the man was drunk; he hasn’t left Poland in these latter days, Jan Bondar said.
Ebola virus disease (EVD), formerly known as Ebola haemorrhagic fever, is a severe, often fatal illness in humans. The virus is transmitted to people from wild animals and spreads in the human population through human-to-human transmission. The average EVD case fatality rate is around 50%. Case fatality rates have varied from 25% to 90% in past outbreaks.
The first EVD outbreaks occurred in remote villages in Central Africa, near tropical rainforests, but the most recent outbreak in West Africa has involved major urban as well as rural areas.
