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Dane admitted to hospital for Ebola testing

A patient who has recently been in west Africa was being tested for Ebola on Tuesday evening, with test results first expected during the course of the day on Wednesday.

Published: 11 November 2014 20:32 CET
Dane admitted to hospital for Ebola testing
This marks the third patient tested for Ebola at Hvidore Hospital in the past five weeks. The others tested negative. Photo: Hvidore Hospital
A Dane who recently returned from west Africa was admitted to Hvidore Hospital on Tuesday afternoon on the suspicion of carrying the Ebola virus, the hospital has announced. 
 
“We determined that there were grounds to admit the patient and we have sent a test to the State Serum Institute,” hospital spokesman Toben Mogensen said in a statement. 
 
The patient was put in isolation late on Tuesday and will remain there until the test results return. An initial result was expected to arrive overnight on Tuesday and a secondary sample will be sent for testing on Wednesday morning. 
 
The current patient is the third to be seen at the suburban Copenhagen hospital for suspected Ebola over the past five weeks. The other patients tested negative. 
 
“We’ve been through this before and we have the procedures and security under control. So our employees and patients do not need to worry about the risk of Ebola. It is not dangerous to be admitted to, or work at, Hvidore Hospital," Mogensen said. 
 
Speaking to broadcaster DR, Mogensen said that the patient was not an international aid worker, but no additional information was given. 

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EBOLA

Spanish researchers develop five-strain vaccine against lethal Ebola virus

Spanish researchers are working on a vaccine against all five strains of the killer Ebola virus in what would be a world first, Madrid's October 12 Hospital said Wednesday (July 11).

Published: 12 July 2018 09:50 CEST
Spanish researchers develop five-strain vaccine against lethal Ebola virus
Ebola protects itself with proteins that act as a shield, and only exposes its vulnerable zones for short periods of time. Photo: AFP

A prototype vaccine developed by pharmaceutical group Merck is already in use, but acts only against the most virulent, “Zaire” strain.

Despite not having market approval, Merck's rVSV-ZEBOV was administered to people in the Democratic Republic of Congo in May, with UN approval, in a bid to contain an outbreak of the same virus that killed more than 11,300 in three West African countries from 2013 to 2015, sparking international panic.

For several months, a team from the October 12 Hospital has been working with researchers at two other hospitals in the capital to examine and learn from blood samples taken from three people cured of Ebola in Spain.

Lead researcher Rafael Delgado told reporters the difficulty lay in the fact that the virus protects itself with proteins that act as a shield, and only exposes its vulnerable zones for short periods of time.

That makes it tough for the body's immune system to fight the virus.

The three Spanish patients had produced “very effective” viral antibodies, though in a “small quantity” and only against the Zaire strain they were contaminated with.

Delgado, head of microbiology at the hospital, said researchers are aiming to reproduce these antibodies on a larger scale, and in a way that would make them efficient against all five virus strains.

US medical giant Johnson & Johnson is separately developing an experimental vaccine against two Ebola strains.

Delgado said researchers hope to get results from mouse experiments within a year.

The Ebola epidemic caused alarm in Spain in 2014 when a nursing assistant, Teresa Romero, became the first person infected outside Africa.

She caught the disease while tending to a Spanish missionary repatriated from Sierra Leone, who died in Spain in September that year.