American nurse exposed to Ebola released from hospital

[December 22, 2014]  (Reuters) - An American nurse who was exposed to Ebola while volunteering in Sierra Leone was released from the National Institutes of Health's Clinical Center in Maryland on Friday without showing signs of the disease, NIH said.

"The patient has shown no clinical or laboratory evidence of Ebola infection and will complete 21 days of monitoring at a private residence in Virginia under the direction of the Virginia Department of Health," NIH said in a statement.

NIH did not release any further information on the nurse, including when he or she might have been exposed to the virus, affiliation or name.

The NIH clinical center is one of the facilities across the United States designated as an Ebola treatment center by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A child who arrived in Chicago with a fever was under observation on Friday at a city hospital to rule out the Ebola virus, hospital officials said.

Ebola has killed nearly 7,000 people out of more than 18,600 infected, nearly all of them in the impoverished West African countries of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.

(Reporting by Curtis Skinner in San Francisco; Editing by Jeremy Laurence)

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