Nearly two dozen people are being monitored for the Ebola virus in Washington state after traveling to African countries where infection rates have spiked in recent months, health officials said Friday.
The state has placed 23 “persons under monitoring” for the deadly disease for 21 days after they returned to the US from Guinea and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the state’s health department said in a press release.
The virus has begun to ravage parts of the N’Zérékoré Prefecture in Guinea — a country where thousands of people died from the illness between 2014 and 2016 — along with the North Kivu Province in the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to the press release.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is now requiring airlines to collect and provide it with contact information for all passengers who were in those two countries, according to the health officials.
But officials stressed that residents of Washington state are still at a “low risk” of contracting the virus.
Ebola, which is far deadlier than the coronavirus, killed at least 11,300 in Guinea, which has a population of 12 million, during the Ebola crisis that began in 2014.
In February, Guinea declared that the Ebola virus had become an epidemic after three people died and four others were hospitalized.
People with the virus often have a fever, aches and pains along with vomiting, diarrhea and other symptoms.