Senegal Confirms Its First Ebola Case

This undated handout photo provided by the journal Science shows Augustine Goba, laboratory director at Kenema Government Hospital in Sierra Leone.  (AP Photo/Stephen Gire, Science)

A man infected with Ebola traveled to Senegal, becoming the first recorded in this country of an outbreak that has hit four other West African countries and has killed more than 1,500 people, the Ministry of Health said Friday.

The infected person is a university student from Guinea who sought treatment at a hospital in Senegal's capital, Dakar, this week, Health Minister Awa Marie Coll Seck told reporters. The young man said he had had contact with Ebola patients while he was in Guinea and was immediately put under quarantine, she said.

Tests from the Institut Pasteur have confirmed that he has Ebola, and the World Health Organization has been alerted.

The arrival of the dreaded disease in Senegal, which is a tourist destination and whose capital is a major transportation hub for the region, underscores that the outbreak is not under control, despite efforts by the World Health Organization, Doctors Without Borders and other organizations.

WHO on Friday said the past week has seen the highest increase of cases — more than 500 — since the outbreak began.

It is not clear how or when the young man came to Senegal, which has closed its border with Guinea. But Seck said that this week an epidemiological surveillance team from Guinea alerted Senegalese authorities that they had lost track of a person who had had contact with the sick. The team said this person may have come to Senegal.

Seck said authorities have determined that the young man now in quarantine is one who fled.

WHO, which is the U.N. health agency, has warned that the disease could eventually infect 20,000 people, and unveiled a plan Thursday to stop transmission in the next six to nine months.

But a top official from Doctors Without Borders, which is running many of the Ebola treatment centers, said the agency wasn't doing enough.

"The World Health Organization can't handle" the outbreak, Mego Terzian, the group's president for France, told France Inter radio. "I don't see how with the current measures how we're going to control the outbreak and stop the outbreak."

On Thursday, officials at the National Institutes of Health in Sierra Leone announced that they were launching safety trials on a preliminary vaccine for Ebola. Researchers have already checked that still-not-tested vaccine against some of the more than 350 mutations in this strain of Ebola to make sure the changes the disease is making won’t undercut science’s hurried efforts to fight it, said Pardis Sabeti, a scientist at Harvard University and its affiliated Broad Institute. She and Gire, also at Broad and Harvard, are two of the lead authors of a study published Thursday in the journal Science that maps the killer disease strain based on specimens collected from 78 patients.