Ebola patient in Germany dies

LEIPZIG, Germany, Oct. 14 (UPI) —

An Ebola virus-infected man working for the World Health Organization in Liberia died in Leipzig, Germany, Tuesday, a hospital statement said.

The unidentified Sudanese man, 56, was a medical worker being treated in an isolation ward in Leipzig’s St. Georg hospital. He was the first of three Ebola patients to arrive in Germany for treatment. A Senegalese patient was treated in Hamburg and discharged before returning home, and a Ugandan doctor remains under treatment in Frankfurt.

The Leipzig hospital assured the public of isolation procedures when the patient arrived Thursday. "There is no risk of infection for other patients, relatives, visitors or the public," Dr. Iris Minde, the chief executive of the clinic, said in a statement, promising the "strictest hygienic protocols according to latest standards."

Last week a nurse’s assistant in Madrid, Spain, became the first person in the current Ebola outbreak to contract the virus in Europe. The first to contract the virus in the United States is a nurse, Nina Pham, who treated an Ebola patient, Thomas Eric Duncan, in a Dallas hospital. Duncan died of the illness.

Over 4,000 people have died of the virus, the overwhelming majority in West Africa.