A suspected Ebola case reported to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) appears to be a hoax after a test on a young man hospitalized on Friday came back negative, a health official said yesterday.
The 19-year-old student now faces a fine of between NT$10,000 and NT$150,000 under the Communicable Disease Control Act (傳染病防治法), which requires people to provide factual information about communicable diseases.
CDC Deputy Director-General Chuang Jen-hsiang (莊人祥) said that the test was negative after samples were rushed to a lab in Taipei early in the morning.
Photo: EPA
The young man’s story about traveling in Africa and eating bat meat are now believed to have been entirely made up.
Chuang said earlier that a search based on the personal information provided by the man yielded no record of him ever leaving Taiwan, despite claims that he had recently been to Nigeria. It turns out that he does not even have a passport, Chuang added.
The claim was also suspicious because Nigeria was declared Ebola-free in October, even as other west African nations continue to battle the spread of the virus.
It was not immediately clear why the young man had given false information to doctors at Kaohsiung Veterans General Hospital, where he was admitted late on Friday.
If the test results had come back positive, the man would have been the nation’s first Ebola case.
The student, who is said to have taken an extended leave from school, has shown no symptoms since being hospitalized and has given contradictory accounts of his condition and purported travels, Chuang said.
The man told doctors in Greater Kaohsiung that he had recently traveled to Nigeria, where he ate a meal made from bat meat. Bats are known to be carriers of the Ebola virus, which has caused about 6,200 deaths this year, mainly in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia.
The man complained of a fever and other symptoms such as vomiting and diarrhea, the hospital said.
Even though the man had not traveled to the three West African nations still listed as having ongoing Ebola outbreaks, the hospital reported the suspected case to the CDC at about midnight on Friday after careful evaluation, Kaohsiung Department of Health official Tsai Wu-hsiung (蔡武雄) said.
As a precaution, the patient had been placed in a negative pressure isolation ward, officials said.
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