Mali is racing to control a fresh Ebola outbreak after confirming its second death from the disease.
Officials said a nurse in the capital, Bamako, died on Tuesday after treating a man who arrived at a clinic from Guinea. The clinic is now in quarantine and under police guard.
The dead man was not related to the person who first died from the virus in Mali — a two-year-old girl traveling home from Guinea last month. There had not been any confirmed cases since then and 108 people linked to the girl completed their 21-day quarantine period on Tuesday.
Mali must now trace other people who had contact with the 25-year-old nurse and three others infected, just as an initial group of people linked to its first case completed their 21-day quarantine on Tuesday. Ebola’s maximum incubation period is 21 days.
The more than 90 people quarantined in Bamako included about 20 UN peacekeepers being treated at the capital’s Pasteur Clinic, where the nurse worked, officials said.
Police locked down the clinic on Tuesday night.
In Sierra Leone, more than 400 health workers at one of its few Ebola treatment centers went on strike over unpaid risk allowances, officials said. Some returned later in the day.
Ebola has killed at least 5,160 people out of at least 14,098 infected since March, predominantly in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, the WHO said in its latest status report from Geneva.
However, in a rare piece of good news, the WHO said there were signs that the incidence of new cases was declining in Guinea and Liberia, although it reported steep increases in Sierra Leone.
In Bamako, the nurse died after treating a Guinea man who died with Ebola-like symptoms that were not initially recognized, the Malian government said.
The man, a Muslim imam from the border town of Kouremale, was never tested for the virus.
In a series of rites that may have exposed many mourners to infection, his highly contagious body was washed in a Bamako mosque and returned to Guinea for burial without precautions.
The WHO said there were now four confirmed and probable Ebola deaths in Mali, adding that one was a friend who had visited the imam in the hospital. The group did not immediately give details on the fourth case.
A doctor at the Pasteur Clinic, one of Bamako’s leading medical centers and the default clinic for expatriates, was also suspected of having Ebola and was being monitored.
The UN peacekeepers, who were at the clinic for injuries sustained while serving in Mali’s turbulent north, were quarantined as a precaution, the UN mission said, without specifying their nationalities.
The government said the nurse was confirmed with Ebola on Tuesday and died later that evening.
All necessary steps to identify people who had contact with the nurse were taken, it said.
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