Brussels becomes latest EU airport to screen for Ebola

Belgium’s Brussels Airport on Monday became the latest European hub to screen passengers for the deadly Ebola virus when a flight landed from Guinea via Sierra Leone, an airport spokeswoman said.

Officials took the temperatures of some 200 Brussels Airlines passengers who had flown from Conakry via Freetown and had them fill out a World Health Organization questionnaire, airport spokeswoman Florence Muls told AFP.

“Everything went very well this morning,” Muls said, adding every passenger tested negative for symptoms of Ebola when they were screened around 4:15 am (0215 GMT).

Sierra Leone and Guinea, along with Liberia, are the countries hardest hit by the Ebola epidemic.

France on Saturday started carrying out health checks on travellers arriving from Guinea. The United States, Britain and Canada have already launched screenings at airports for passengers from Ebola-hit zones.

Air links are scarce between Europe and west African nations struggling to fight the disease.

For now, Air France is maintaining its flights between Paris Charles de Gaulle airport and Conakry, Guinea. Brussels Airlines serves Conakry and the Liberian capital Monrovia from Brussels.

The worst-ever outbreak of the deadly virus has killed more than 4,500 people, almost all in west Africa, with close to 2,500 deaths registered in Liberia alone.

But several isolated cases among health workers in the US and Europe have sparked fear that the epidemic could turn global and prompted Western countries to ramp up their response.