Johannesburg - A guest house in Yeoville was cordoned off in an Ebola scare on Monday after a Nigerian, who had arrived in the country a few hours earlier, collapsed and died shortly after booking in.
The man had a fever, a headache and abdominal pains.
Shortly after the emergency services were alerted, police called the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD), who said they would send out a professor to take a sample from the body.
Popo Maja, spokesman for the national Department of Health, said the NICD would be testing for meningococcal sepsis and malaria. “Ebola is highly unlikely as it has been brought under control in Nigeria and many Ebola symptoms were absent,” he said.
NICD spokeswoman Nombuso Shabalala said the man would be tested for the above diseases as well as Ebola.
The institute was still investigating because it had no history for the man. He was unaccompanied and they did not know where he had travelled.
Shabalala said the symptoms he experienced could be meningococcal in nature, but Ebola did not have specific symptoms, so they could not yet rule it out.
When The Star arrived on the scene, the cordon had been lifted and people and cars were moving freely in and out of the guest house property, although the body was still inside and had not yet been tested.
Yeoville police spokesman Constable Thabo Malatji confirmed that they were waiting for a professor from Pretoria to examine the body.
In the meantime, the Johannesburg Emergency Management Services (Jems) said it had retrained all its medical and paramedical staff on how to handle call-outs.
“We have regular, almost weekly workshops on how to respond to cases which are suspicious and where known Ebola symptoms are identified.
“We respond to numerous call-outs on a daily basis, and do not know what to expect, and that is why staff are undergoing constant training,” said Jems spokesman Robert Mulaudzi.
DA Gauteng health spokesman Jack Bloom said it was highly unlikely that the man died of Ebola. However, there were many other contagious diseases that it could be, and emergency staff needed to be more cautious and quick with the testing.
The scare came on the same day that the World Health Organisation declared Nigeria Ebola-free after a 42-day period with no new cases.
The first case in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, was imported from Liberia, when Liberian-American diplomat Patrick Sawyer collapsed at the international airport in Lagos on July 20.
Because the country was ill-prepared and had no screening procedures in place, Sawyer was able to infect several people, including health workers in the hospital where he was taken, which did not have proper protection equipment.
Ebola has killed 4 546 people across Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, the three worst-affected countries.
The Star