A patient taken into Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow in the early hours of Tuesday was tested for Ebola. The result came back negative.
Public Health Scotland (PHS) described the test as a “precautionary measure” and said in a statement that there were currently “no confirmed cases of Ebola” in Scotland. Had the result been positive, it would have been the first case in the UK since the World Health Organization declared the outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo a public health emergency of international concern. That outbreak, which also reached Uganda, began in May.
NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde said earlier that no wards were closed at the hospital. Patients and visitors were not told to stay away.
What officials said
PHS said it was working with the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) to assess the routes by which travellers from affected countries can enter Britain. “The risk to people arriving in the UK from affected areas is low and the NHS has safe procedures in place to detect and treat such cases,” a spokesperson said. Health boards across Scotland already have protocols for assessing and testing arrivals from Ebola-affected areas. Where needed, contact tracing follows, and contacts may be assessed clinically and tested as a precaution.
The UKHSA Returning Workers Scheme was also activated once the suspected case came to light. The scheme exists to monitor the health of people who travel from the UK to affected areas for work, and PHS said organisations sending staff to places where they could be exposed to Ebola should register them.
The outbreak abroad
The Bundibugyo strain of Ebola has produced nearly 700 confirmed cases, most of them in Congo. About 138 people have died, two of them in neighbouring Uganda.
Britain has committed up to £21 million to the local response in Congo. It has also sent members of the UK Public Health Rapid Support Team, a group of seven specialists drawn from UKHSA and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. Four will be based in eastern Congo to back WHO field operations, and one will join the WHO country office in Kinshasa. An epidemiologist is going to the Republic of Congo.
Dr Edmund Newman, who directs the team at UKHSA, said the deployment “will help strengthen the existing response to the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo and across the region.” He added: “We know that infectious diseases are not limited by borders.” The team was first set up during the West Africa Ebola outbreak of 2014 and 2015.
Past UK cases
Ebola is not airborne in the way flu or Covid is. It passes through direct contact with blood or other bodily fluids, and people usually become contagious only after symptoms start. Those symptoms appear two to 21 days after infection and begin like flu or malaria, with fever, headache and tiredness. Vomiting and diarrhoea follow, and the illness can lead to organ failure.
The last confirmed cases in the UK were three health workers who came home from West Africa in 2014 and 2015 after treating patients there. All three were treated in a high-level isolation unit and recovered, and nobody else caught the virus from them. In November 2022, part of Colchester hospital was deep-cleaned over a suspected case that turned out to be negative. Infectious disease experts say the wider risk to the public is very low.
Sources
- Patient tests negative after Ebola alert at Glasgow hospital
- Patient tests negative for Ebola at Glasgow superhospital
