In a development that comes hours after the World Health Organization raised the global risk level of the ongoing Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to its highest tier, a Netherlands hospital confirmed Friday that it has admitted a patient for what it describes as “low suspicion” of the deadly virus.
Officials at Radboud University Medical Center, based in the eastern Dutch city of Nijmegen, announced that the patient has already been transferred to a purpose-built specialized isolation ward, where medical teams will conduct ongoing observation, diagnostic testing and targeted precautionary treatment. As of Friday’s public announcement, the hospital has not released any additional identifying information about the patient, nor has it shared details about whether the individual has any recent travel history to Ebola-affected regions.
This is not the first time the Nijmegen-based medical facility has found itself at the center of a public infectious disease safety conversation. Just months earlier on May 11, the hospital made international headlines when a dozen of its clinical staff members were placed into mandatory preventive quarantine. The quarantine was triggered after procedural mistakes occurred while the team was caring for an evacuee from the cruise ship MV Hondius who tested positive for hantavirus. The errors were made during the handling of the patient’s blood samples and the disposal of the individual’s urine, prompting public scrutiny of the facility’s infection control protocols at the time.
Earlier on the same Friday this potential Ebola case was announced, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced that the global health body was upgrading its official risk assessment for the DR Congo outbreak to the top red level, amid a steady rise in confirmed and suspected fatalities from the virus. Tedros described the unfolding public health crisis in the central African nation as “deeply worrisome”, noting that official counts now stand at nearly 750 suspected Ebola cases across the country, with 177 suspected deaths tied to the outbreak.