Deadly Ebola Virus; Woman collapses showing symptoms of the Ebola Virus in Berlin, Germany

The Berlin hospital treating a woman for an infectious disease said Tuesday it’s unlikely the patient has Ebola, after emergency services in the German capital deployed around 60 police, medics and firefighters to lock down the job center she collapsed in.

“The doctors assume an infectious gastrointestinal illness,” Manuela Zingl, a spokeswoman for the Berlin Charité hospital, said in a statement, adding the hospital still has to carry out blood tests to rule out the deadly virus that has claimed more than a thousand lives in an outbreak across West Africa.

While the feverish woman returned from Africa eight days before her collapse, she hadn’t been in an Ebola-infected area, the Berlin Senate Department for Health said in a statement.

Earlier Tuesday, around 40 police officers and 20 firefighters isolated 600 people at the employment center for several hours after the woman, who is aged around 30, was taken ill and showed symptoms of an infectious disease which medical personnel suspected could have been Ebola. Emergency workers also took two people who were in contact with the patient to hospital.

The rapid security deployment around the job center and the decision to seal off the building underline the alertness of emergency services in Europe, as the weeks-old outbreak of Ebola in western Africa has yet to be contained.

Tuesday’s developments come less than a week after the foreign ministry advised Germans to leave several West African countries in the grip of the Ebola outbreak. More than 1,100 people have died from the illness in Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone.