The Ebola virus killed 84 people in just three days last week, bringing the global death toll to 1,229, the World Health Organisation revealed today.
The latest figures came as it emerged that a 48-year-old British woman who collapsed and died in Austria following a trip to Nigeria did not die from the disease.
Head of the regional health board in Austria, Franz Katzgraber, said tests had ruled out the virus but the cause of death remained unknown.
The woman had travelled from Nigeria to Germany where she then flew back to Austria to her home at Vomp, a town in the Austrian state of Tyrol.
An autopsy will now be carried out to confirm the cause of death.
The WHO declared the West African Ebola outbreak a ‘public health emergency of international concern’ on Aug. 8, triggering global alarm as countries stepped up precautions and testing.
Reflecting this, emergency services in Berlin on Tuesday cordoned off a job centre and took a woman with Ebola-like symptoms including high fever to hospital.
Meanwhile, it has been reported that 17 patients suspected of having Ebola who disappeared after a health centre in Liberia was attacked have been traced.
Liberian minister Lewis Brown told the BBC they ‘finally turned themselves in’ at another treatment centre after the government initially denied they were missing.
The WHO said the death toll had now risen to 1,229 from among the 2,240 reported cases in Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone.
The latest figures include 84 additional deaths from 113 new cases reported between August 14 and 16.
Agency officials warned that measures to restrict travel in heavily infected areas, including quarantines of whole villages and counties, are limiting access to food in many cases.
Liberia was the hardest-hit country in the latest figures, with 48 new cases and 53 deaths.
That lifted its total count of cases to 834, with 466 deaths.
The new WHO toll predates an attack overnight Saturday on a quarantine centre in the Liberian capital Monrovia that caused 17 Ebola patients to flee who remain missing.
Sierra Leone recorded 38 new infections and 17 fatalities, the new WHO data showed.
As a result, Sierra Leone’s total case count increased to 848 and its death toll to 365.
Guinea counted 24 new cases and 14 new deaths. That lifted the total number of cases to 543, with 394 deaths.
Nigeria, meanwhile, recorded three new cases but no deaths.
All told, Nigeria has now seen 15 cases and four fatalities, the data show.
Daily Mail.