A suspected outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in a Paris suburb on Thursday has been described by authorities as a false alarm and the situation has gone back to normal, according to statements Friday.
Late Thursday, health and police authorities had quarantined a building in Cergy-Pointoise, northwest of Paris, where one African person who had been to Guinea in West Africa fell ill with Ebola-like flu symptoms, "Le Figaro" reported.
Two other people were also showing signs of illness when the local Prefect Jean-Luc Nevache sealed off the building and its 60 inhabitants pending medical testing, which revealed it was not Ebola and was a false alarm, "France Info" said Friday.
Guinea is one of the core areas for the Ebola outbreak and over three thousand people have died there and in neighbouring Sierra Leone and Liberia in the past several months.
One isolated fatality has been reported in the USA, in Texas, and in Spain, where a nurse is critically ill after taking care of an infected patient. Several others are under observation in Spain, and one French nurse has recently been cured of the illness here after contracting it in Africa.
France is on high alert for a possible outbreak, as it has close contacts with West Africa, and has put in place extra screening at airports. There is also a large population of West Africans in France, with the risk of transmission of Ebola through returning residents.
Health Minister Marisol Touraine said this week that measures were in place to deal with any outbreak of the disease, which international health officials are now putting on a par with AIDS for its magnitude.
Some US health and scientific circles were quoted here by "L'Express" magazine as saying there was a 75 percent chance of an outbreak in France by October 24 but this has been refuted by other experts who say the chances of an outbreak are around 20 percent.