(Reuters) — A U.N. medical official who caught Ebola while working in Liberia and died in a German hospital suffered from a “severe cases of the disease,” a chief physician said in Leipzig on Tuesday (October 14).
Bernhard Ruf of the department of infectious and tropical diseases and nephrology at St.Georg clinic said in a video message released by the hospital that “the patient who was hospitalised … and was treated with a severe case of Ebola died yesterday due to a very severe case of the disease with a viral haemorrhagic fever syndrome.”
The unidentified 56-year-old Sudanese U.N. employee had caught Ebola while working in Liberiawhere the illness was diagnosed on October 5.
On October 9, the patient was flown to Germany for treatment where he “succumbed to the serious infectious disease,” according to a written statement released by the Leipzig hospital on Tuesday morning (October 13).
The St. Georg clinic did not want to hold a news conference and instead released the video taped message to broadcasters.
The statement coincides with reports that the number of Ebola cases in West Africa will exceed 9,000 this week and that the epidemic is still expanding geographically in Guinea, Sierra Leone andLiberia, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
The death toll so far in the outbreak, first reported in Guinea in March, has reached 4,447 from a total of 8,914 cases, according to the WHO.
