- BERLIN - A German who sparked
alarm in Berlin when he fell ill with a tropical disease that doctors at
first feared might be the deadly Ebola virus died on Friday of yellow fever,
five days after returning from West Africa.
- It appeared he might have been the victim of an unlucky
chance that prior immunisation against the disease had failed to work.
- The doctor who treated 40-year-old Olaf Ullmann said
yellow fever and Ebola had similar symptoms -- heavy bleeding and high
fever -- which had delayed diagnosis until Friday. But, as with other viruses,
there was nothing else doctors could have done.
- "Even had we known from the beginning he was suffering
from yellow fever it would not have changed the treatment," Norbert
Suttorp of Berlin's Charite hospital told a news conference called to allay
fears about an outbreak of killer disease.
- An expert in tropical diseases said Ullmann, a cameraman
who had spent two weeks shooting a wildlife film in Ivory Coast, had probably
been bitten by an infected mosquito and there was no reason to think he
had passed on the infection to anyone else.
- Ullmann's wife, who like two other people who travelled
with the dead man has shown no sign of illness, told doctors her husband
had been vaccinated against yellow fever in 1993. The treatment is considered
effective for at least 10 years.
- However, in about one percent of cases it does not work.
- Immunisation, which is compulsory for visitors to tropical
regions of Africa where yellow fever is endemic, means it is most rare
in Europe. The last death in Germany was in 1946.
- Charite said it would maintain for the next day or two
the strict quarantine regime it imposed around its isolation unit.
- Guards erected barriers around the ward as German newspapers
ran banner headlines warning of the "Ebola Scare". The highly
contagious disease is fatal in as many as four cases in five.
- Tropical medicine experts had treated Ullmann wearing
hermetic plastic suits but were fighting a losing battle to save him after
his liver and kidneys failed on Thursday.
- Suttorp said he had slipped in and out of consciousness
and had finally been unable to breathe. His wife was kept 80 km (50 miles)
away, under medical observation at home.
- Yellow fever is widespread in Africa and Latin America
and, like all viruses, cannot be cured directly. Doctors can only keep
victims' strength up to help their immune system fight it.
- Ullmann had returned home to the eastern border town
of Frankfurt-an-der-Oder on Sunday and was airlifted to Berlin on Tuesday
after his condition deteriorated sharply.
- Swissair, which flew the Ullmanns and the couple travelling
with them home via Zurich, said it had handed over its passenger lists
to the German authorities in line with regulations. But there was no word
that fellow passengers had been warned.
- Doctors said that, as Ullmann had no symptoms on the
flight, it was nearly impossible he could have passed on his disease.
- Medical staff at the Charite hospital criticised the
media for playing up the incident. It has filled pages of German newspapers
for several days during the summer news lull.