Ebola alert at immigration centre after woman from Africa falls ill
A FEMALE detainee who took ill at an immigration removal centre is being tested for the Ebola virus, it emerged last night.
The detainee, understood to be from Sierra Leone, was at Dungavel detention centre in South Lanarkshire but has been taken to hospital to undergo tests for the deadly infection.
The news came after warnings that the outbreak in West Africa could take six months to bring under control.
Yesterday, it was reported that the Home Office has suspended the detention or release of detainees from the Dungavel centre until test results are known, but staff and visitors are being allowed in and out.
More than 1,000 people have died in the Ebola outbreak which has swept across West Africa.
Last night, neither the Home Office nor NHS Lanarkshire would confirm details about the person being tested.
Previously, health protection agencies in Scotland have refused to reveal details about the number of people being tested for the virus here.
An NHS Lanarkshire spokesman said: “We are currently investigating a possible case of viral haemorrhagic fever [Ebola].
“This is a precautionary measure and it would appear at this stage to be highly unlikely the patient will test positive for Ebola.”
A Home Office spokesman said: “We do not comment on operational matters.”
Last month, it emerged that two athletes from Sierra Leone taking part in the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow had been tested for Ebola after falling ill, negative.
At the time, Health Protection Scotland (HPS) said no-one had tested positive for Ebola in Scotland.
Yesterday, the medical agency Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) warned that the Ebola outbreak in West Africa could last another six months, with others claiming the true death toll was still unknown.
Tarnue Karbbar, who works for the aid group Plan International in northern Liberia, said response teams were simply not able to document all the
but
the
results
were cases developing. Many of the sick were still being hidden at home by their relatives, too fearful of going to Ebola treatment centres.
Others were buried before the teams could get to the area, he said. In the past few days, some 75 cases have emerged in a single district.
“Our challenge now is to quarantine the area to successfully break the transmission,” he said, referring to the Voinjama district.
Gregory Hartl, a spokesman for the World Health Organisation in Geneva, said beds in treatment centres were filling up faster than they could be provided – evidence that the outbreak in West Africa is far more severe than the numbers show.
There were 40 beds at a treatment centre that MSF recently took over in one quarantined county in Liberia but 137 people have flocked there, packing the hallways until they can be separated into those who are infected and those are not, said MSF’s international president, Joanne Liu.
“It’s absolutely dangerous,” said Ms Liu, who recently returned from Guinea, and Sierra Leone.
“With the massive influx of patients that we had over the last few days, we’re not able to keep zones of patients anymore. Everybody is mixed,” she said.
The UN health agency warned that the official counts of 1,069 dead and 1,975 infected may still “vastly underestimate the magnitude of the outbreak”.
It said extraordinary measures were needed “on a massive scale to contain the outbreak in settings characterised by extreme poverty, dysfunctional health systems, a severe shortage of doctors, and rampant fear”.
Ebola causes a high fever, bleeding and vomiting. It has no cure and no licensed treatment, and has been fatal in at least 50 per cent of cases, experts said.
The disease is usually found in eastern or central Africa, typically in rural, isolated communities, where outbreaks tend to be “selflimiting”, Mr Hartl said.
By contrast, the current outbreak spread quickly to cities and the capitals of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, making it difficult to stop.
Liberia