Feverish' Colchester Hospital patient isolated as Ebola precaution

Diary
Paul Farmer

I have just returned from Liberia with a group of physicians and health activists. We are heading back in a few days. The country is in the midst of the largest ever epidemic of Ebola haemorrhagic fever. It’s an acute and brutal affliction. Ebola is a zoonosis – it leaps from animal hosts to humans – which is caused by a filovirus (a thread-like virus that causes internal and external bleeding). It was first described in 1976 in rural Congo, not far from the Ebola River, as an acute-onset syndrome characterised by complaints of weakness, followed by fever and abdominal pain. Patients became dehydrated as a consequence of fever, vomiting and diarrhoea. Many became delirious and started to haemorrhage from the mouth, nose, vagina, at sites where intravenous lines had been placed, even from the eyes... [link to www.lrb.co.uk]