A boat carrying immigrants from Africa prompted Ebola fears when it landed on a nudist beach in the Canary Islands, authorities said.
In a effort to secure a better life in Spain, 19 Africans -- including three from Guinea and Sierra Leone, countries currently in the grip of an Ebola outbreak -- landed their small boat on Gran Canaria's Maspalomas sand dunes, long a popular nudist beach for European tourists.
A number of the Africans showed symptoms of fever, and local Red Cross workers made the decision to employ emergency Ebola procedures, leaving face masks, food and water 50 yards away from the boats and the immigrants, who were kept isolated on the beach for 7 hours.
Four of the boat's occupants were eventually transported to a local hospital, while the remaining immigrants were held at a camp elsewhere on the island to await transportation back to their home countries.
The boat the immigrants arrived in was reportedly burned.
The government of Gran Canaria later announced none of the immigrants were suffering from Ebola.
The Canary Islands, located just 90 miles off the northwest coast of Africa by Morocco, are a territory of Spain. Gran Canaria is the second-most populated island in the group.
Illegal immigration to the islands, often by small boat, has become a problem, authorities said, especially with fears of Ebola.
"It presents risks because [the island] is an established destination," said Marco Aurelio Perez, mayor of San Bartolomé on Gran Canaria.
In West Africa, Ebola has infected 13,268 people since the beginning of the outbreak in March and 4,960 people have died, the latest data from the World Health Organization shows.
The rate of new cases in Liberia and Guinea seems to have stabilized, but the spread of the disease in Sierra Leone has continued unabated, WHO officials say.
The slowing of the rate of infections in some parts of Africa has led the head of the United Nations Ebola effort to say the global response to the outbreak has given him hope it could end in 2015.
However, there is a long way to go, Dr. David Nabarro said.
"Until the last case of Ebola is under treatment, we have to stay on full alert," he said. "It's still bad."
Five times the number of beds for treatment of Ebola sufferers are in place in the hardest-hit countries than there were three months ago, Nabarro said, and improved efforts to locate infected people and others they've been in contact with is helping reduce the number of cases.
