Preliminary tests on two patients in isolation at LHSC's Victoria Hospital have come back negative for Ebola.
The Middlesex-London Health Unit says while the news is encouraging, they will continue to monitor the situation closely and the results of further testing is expected in the next few days.
The pair, a mother and child who are refugees, recently travelled to Canada from Guinea and were referred to London by public health officials in Kitchener-Waterloo.
Victoria Hospital was designated as a treatment facility for Ebola by the Ministry of Health last year.
Dr. Chris Mackie, medical officer of health with the Middlesex-London Health Unit, says the two arrived on Feb. 2 and were checked for symptoms before their departure from Guinea and on arrival in Canada. They also come from an area of Guinea where Ebola is not present.
"The risk for the general public is exceedingly low, because first of all, the symptoms seems unlikely to be Ebola, second of all, all of the systems that we have in place to protect the public against Ebola fell into place nicely...The other aspect is that Ebola only really becomes very contagious later in the disease. So this is caught so early that it's unlikely that they would even be able to infect people at this stage of the disease...The risk to the public and people in the hospital is very low."
London Health Sciences Centre said in a statement that the patients were placed in a negative pressure room at the hospital around 10 p.m. Tuesday.
LHSC officials say the patients did not enter through the emergency department and that there is “no impact to patient and visitor activity at the hospital.”
To protect patient confidentiality the pair’s names will not be released.
Mackie says, "There have been hundreds of people that have been monitored across the country that have travelled to affected countries and dozens of situations where people have had symptoms and they turned out to be nothing, so I think it's fair to say it was a matter of time before we had somebody with some symptoms that had been to that part of west Africa coming to our region."
Even with a negative result, health officials will continue to follow-up with the mother and child until they have been out of the Ebola infected country for 21 days, which is standard practice.
