A United Nations medical worker who was infected with Ebola in Liberia has died despite “intensive medical procedures,” a German hospital said on Tuesday October 14.
The St. Georg Hospital in Leipzig said the 56-year-old man, whose name has since been withheld, died overnight of the infection. It released no further details and did not answer any telephone calls.
The man tested positive for Ebola on Oct. 6, prompting Liberia’s UN peacekeeping mission to place some 41 staff members who may have had some contact with him under “close medical observation.”
He was flown to Leipzig for treatment on Oct. 9 where he was put into a special isolation unit. He was the third Ebola patient to be flown to Germany for treatment since the outbreak began in the West African Countries of Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea.
The first patient, a Senegalese man infected with Ebola while working for the World Health Organization in Sierra Leone was taken to a Hamburg hospital in late August for treatment. The man was released Oct. 3 after he recovered, and has since returned to Senegal, the hospital said.
Another patient, a Ugandan man who worked for an Italian aid group in West Africa, is undergoing treatment in a Frankfurt hospital.
However the death of this UN medic in Germany has raised many concerns over the preparedness of the European and American public health programs to contain the disease should it spread there. So far the death of Thomas Eric Duncan, the Liberian man who died in the US city of Dallas, who may have contracted the disease from Liberia, and the subsequent infection of two nurses at the same hospital in Dallas has degraded mass confidence in the American Public Health System.
Any further infections of hospital workers in the US or death of Ebola patients in Europe or the US will erode confidence even in the efforts some Western countries are investing in the containment and eventual eradication of Ebola in the affected West African countries, and furthermore the loss of faith in international protocols for the prevention and spread of Ebola outside West Africa.
