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Mali Confirms New Ebola Case

Mali Confirms New Ebola Case, Locks Down Clinic
Reuters
In this photo taken Saturday, Oct. 25, 2014, health workers walk towards an area used for Ebola quarantine after they worked with diseased Fanta Kone at a Ebola virus center in Kayes, Mali. After 2-year-old Fanta Koneâs father died in southern Guinea, the toddlerâs grandmother took her from the forested hills where the Ebola outbreak first began months ago to bring her home to Mali. It wasnât long, though, before the little girl started getting nosebleeds. (AP Photo/Baba Ahmed)
In this photo taken Saturday, Oct. 25, 2014, health workers walk towards an area used for Ebola quarantine after they worked with diseased Fanta Kone at a Ebola virus center in Kayes, Mali. After 2-year-old Fanta Koneâs father died in southern Guinea, the toddlerâs grandmother took her from the forested hills where the Ebola outbreak first began months ago to bring her home to Mali. It wasnât long, though, before the little girl started getting nosebleeds. (AP Photo/Baba Ahmed)

(Recasts with government confirming case)

BAMAKO, Nov 11 (Reuters) - The government of Mali confirmed the country's second case of Ebola late on Tuesday and police deployed outside a clinic in the capital, Bamako, that authorities said had been quarantined.

In a statement via Twitter, Mali's Information Minister Mahamadou Camara said "prevention measures" were being taken, but gave no details on the case. Local officials and diplomats said the new case was unrelated to the first one last month.

Mali became the sixth West African country to record a case of Ebola when a two-year-old girl from Guinea died in October. It has not recorded any confirmed cases since then and 108 people linked to the girl were due to complete their 21-day quarantine period on Tuesday.

Mali shares an 800 km (500 mile) border with Guinea, which alongside Liberia and Sierra Leone, has been worst affected by an Ebola outbreak that has killed nearly 5,000 people this year.

Medical officials and diplomats said Mali's new Ebola case was a nurse who had been in contact with a man who arrived from Guinea and died in late October at the now locked down Pasteur Clinic.

One medical officer, who asked not to be identified, said the nurse who had Ebola died on Tuesday evening while another doctor was ill and had been quarantined. A government spokesman was not available to comment on the nurse's reported death.

A Reuters reporter said that by nightfall police had deployed heavily in the area around the clinic, which is in the ACI 2000 neighborhood and is considered among the city's best.

The bodies of those who die with Ebola are contagious for up to three days after death, raising the risk of further infection if not dealt with properly.

Officials said the man believed to have brought the second case of Ebola to Mali was an imam from Guinea. He was not tested for Ebola while he was ill in Mali and his body was returned to Guinea without necessary precautions for the disease being taken, raising the prospect of further infections that will now have to be traced. (Reporting by Joe Penney and Tiemoko Diallo; writing and additional reporting by David Lewis; editing by Grant McCool and G Crosse)

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Before You Go

1
Ebola is highly infectious and even being in the same room as someone with the disease can put you at risk
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Not as far as we know. Ebola isn't contagious until symptoms begin, and it spreads through direct contact with the bodily fluids of patients. It is not, from what we know of the science so far, an airborne virus. So contact with the patient's sweat, blood, vomit, feces or semen could cause infection, and the body remains infectious after death. Much of the spread in west Africa has been attributed to the initial distrust of medical staff, leaving many to be treated at home by loved ones, poorly equipped medics catching the disease from patients, and the traditional burial rites involving manually washing of the dead body. From what we know already, you can't catch it from the air, you can't catch it from food, you can't catch it from water.
2
Cancelling all flights from west Africa would stop the spread of Ebola
ASSOCIATED PRESS
This actually has pretty serious implications. British Airways suspended its four-times-weekly flights to Liberia and Sierra Leone until the end of March, the only direct flight to the region from the UK. In practice, anyone can just change planes somewhere else and get to Britain from Europe, north Africa, or the Middle East. And aid agencies say that flight cancellations are hampering efforts to get the disease under control, they rely on commercial flights to get to the infected regions. Liberia's information minister, Lewis Brown, told the Telegraph this week that BA was putting more people in danger. "We need as many airlines coming in to this region as possible, because the cost of bringing in supplies and aid workers is becoming prohibitive," he told the Telegraph. "There just aren't enough seats on the planes. I can understand BA's initial reaction back in August, but they must remember this is a global fight now, not just a west African one, and we can't just be shut out." Christopher Stokes, director of MSF in Brussels, agreed: “Airlines have shut down many flights and the unintended consequence has been to slow and hamper the relief effort, paradoxically increasing the risk of this epidemic spreading across countries in west Africa first, then potentially elsewhere. We have to stop Ebola at source and this means we have to be able to go there.”
3
Temperature screening at airports is an effective way to stop those who have the disease from travelling
ASSOCIATED PRESS
The screening process is pretty porous, especially when individuals want to subvert it. Wake up on the morning of your flight, feel a bit hot, and you definitely don't want to be sent to an isolation booth for days and have to miss your flight. Take an ibuprofen and you can lower your temperature enough to get past the scanners. And if you suspect you have Ebola, you might be desperate to leave, seeing how much better the treatment success has been in western nations. And experts have warned that you cannot expect people to be honest about who they have had contact with. Thomas Eric Duncan, the Ebola victim who died in Texas, told officials he had not been in contact with anyone with the disease, but had in fact visited someone in the late stages of the virus, though he said he believed it was malaria. The extra screening that the US implemented since his death probably wouldn't have singled out Duncan when he arrived from hard-hit Liberia last month, because he had no symptoms while travelling.
4
Border staff should stop people coming in to the country who are at risk
LEON NEAL via Getty Images
They're not doctors, and it's a monumental task to train 23,500 people who work for the UK Border Agency how to correctly diagnose a complex disease, and spot it in the millions of people who come through British transport hubs. Public Health England has provided UK Border Force with advice on the assessment of an unwell patient on entry to UK, but they can't be expected to check everyone.
5
Screening at British airports should be implemented to stop unwell people coming in from affected areas
ASSOCIATED PRESS
As mentioned before, the UK, especially London, is a major transport hub. Unlike the US, most of those coming from west Africa will have crossed through Europe, so infected people could be coming from practically anywhere, not just flights directly from those countries. This would require the UK to screen every returning traveller, as people could return to the UK from an affected country through any port of entry. This would be huge numbers of low risk people, at vast, vast expense.
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