(Reuters) – A traveler who returned from Mali tested negative for Ebola at a New York City hospital on Thursday, and a patient who recently came back from West Africa awaited test results at a Missouri hospital, health officials said.
Preliminary test results showed the traveler who returned to the United States from a trip to Mali does not have the disease, but the patient will remain in isolation at Bellevue Hospital Center for further testing, the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation said in a statement.
In Crystal City, Missouri, a patient who recently returned from West Africa was tested for Ebola after arriving with a fever at Mercy Jefferson Hospital. Test results were expected on Friday at the latest, said hospital spokesman John Winkelman.
The patient was being held in isolation at an off-site surgical center and was considered at low risk for Ebola, the hospital said. It was withholding further information about the patient, but local media described the person as a female nurse.
Mali shares a border with Guinea, one of three West African nations hardest hit by the virus. The worst outbreak of Ebola on record has killed at least 5,420 people out of at least 15,145 cases reported since March, mostly in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
Six people in Mali have died so far from Ebola, according to the World Health Organization.
The New York City health department has designated Bellevue, the country’s oldest public hospital, as the facility where any suspected Ebola patients in New York would be transferred.
Last week, the hospital discharged a New York doctor cured of Ebola, which he contracted treating patients in Guinea while working with the humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders.
(Reporting by Barbara Goldberg in New York; Additional reporting by Brendan O’Brien in Milwaukee; Editing by Sandra Maler, Will Dunham and Mohammad Zargham)