The patient is being treated at Emory’s Serious Communicable Disease Unit, the same unit that treated four Ebola patients in 2014. Few other details about the patient have been released.
Lassa fever frequently produces symptoms similar to those of Ebola, including hemorrhagic fever and bleeding, but is much less deadly and much harder to spread from person to person. Typically, Lassa fever is spread by rats and is only deadly in roughly 1 percent of all individuals.
The last time Lassa fever made headlines in the U.S. was in May 2015, when a man who returned to New Jersey after a visit to Liberia died from the viral disease.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to the patient as a “physician’s assistant” as opposed to a “physician assistant” in the first sentence. We regret this error.
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