By SANCHESKA BROWN

Tribune Staff Reporter

sbrown@tribunemedia.net

THE US CENTERS for Disease Control has confirmed that the patient who died in hospital last month after visiting Africa did not have the Ebola virus, Health Minister Dr Perry Gomez said yesterday.

However, Dr Gomez said doctors are still unsure of what caused the 51-year-old woman’s death.

At a press conference at the Ministry of Health, Dr Gomez said the report from the CDC “confirmed through conclusive testing” that the patient did not

suffer from the deadly illness and concretely ruled out the possibility of Ebola as the cause of death in this issue.

The woman had gone to Johannesburg, South Africa in early March. She died in the Princess Margaret Hospital on Sunday, March 27.

Dr Gomez said a “pathological examination will continue” to determine the cause of death. He also explained that the findings “took some time” because local couriers “refused” to take the blood sample and ship it overseas.

“I think there was the concern, because you had a patient with a fever who was quite ill who travelled to Africa. However in this case, it was not an area of Africa that was affected by Ebola. Africa is a very large continent, in fact the largest in the world and so that is where the idea came from,” Dr Gomez said.

“...A definitive answer is not known yet as to how she died. In other circumstances a postmortem would have been done but the hospital could not proceed with one until we got this result, which took us long because we had other issues that arose. We had great difficulty getting the licensed couriers to take the sample - they both refused to take the sample and so the blood could not leave. It wasn’t until late in the week that D J Brokerage, a firm unbeknownst to us previously, whose business is related to world couriers, was able to get the sample out. The others refused to accept it.”

According to a statement from PMH last month, the 51-year-old patient had returned to the Bahamas on March 15 after travelling to Johannesburg two weeks earlier.

She was not officially identified, but The Tribune understands she is Patty Miller, an employee at the Ministry of Youth, Sports and Culture.

Concerns were raised over the Easter holiday weekend after rumours began to spread on social media that a patient, who had recently returned to the Bahamas from Africa, was suspected of having the Ebola virus.

However, in March, PMH said “senior health officials” had confirmed that the patient had not shown symptoms “in a manner which indicates Ebola to be the likely diagnosis.”

PMH’s statement in March also said that as with “any potential infectious disease case” it was taking the “necessary precautions and abiding by the highest protocols requisite for such cases within international guidelines.”