SHARE
COPY LINK

EBOLA

Ebola alarm strands flight in Copenhagen

Ebola suspicion left an arriving flight quarantined for over an hour at Copenhagen Airport on Saturday afternoon, Danish and Norwegian media reported.

Ebola alarm strands flight in Copenhagen
"It is best to be on the safe side," an airport spokeswoman said. File photo: News Øresund – Johan Wessman/Flickr
An SAS flight arrived at Copenhagen Airport from Paris on Saturday with a passenger whom flight personnel suspecting of possibly suffering from Ebola-like symptoms. 
 
“There was a French woman on board with flu symptoms and because she was in west Africa a month ago, we didn’t take any chances,” Copenhagen Airport spokeswoman Lea Holm told broadcaster DR.
 
Passengers were not allowed to leave the plane until a health inspector came on board to check on the woman. The inspector quickly ruled out Ebola and the flight was allowed to proceed to its gate. 
 
The ill woman was taken to an area hospital, Holm said. 
 
 
SAS confirmed the incident to Norwegian newspaper VG.
 
“It was put in isolation due to the suspicion that a passenger on board was infected with Ebola,” SAS spokeswoman Trine Kronmann-Mikkelsen told VG
 
The quarantine lasted under an hour and Holm said that the incident proved that Copenhagen Airport is prepared to handle a potential Ebola threat.
 
“Today we saw that our emergency procedures work. It is best to be on the safe side in these cases,” Holm told DR. 

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.

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).

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.