Emergency services and medical staff held an exercise at the airport this morning to test their response should a patient carrying a  highly infectious disease arrive in Malta.

The exercise started with the 'arrival' of the patient at 10am.

Photo: Darrin Zammit Lupi

The woman had hypothetically visited Sierra Leone in the past 21 days and so fit the criteria of possibly being infected with Ebola. She had fever and was swollen and bleeding.

The other passengers on board who came within a metre of the patient were escorted off the flight to be handed over to the Port Health authorities.

A hazmat unit was waiting for the woman in front of the aircraft to transfer her to Mater Dei Hospital.

The patient was taken off the plane in an incubator on an isolation stretcher.

In a real case scenario, she would have been taken directly to the hospital’s infectious diseases unit but Mater Dei was not taking part in this exercise.

The aim of the exercise was to evaluate the response to a simulated serious health emergency.

This training forms part of an ongoing commitment to enhance national incident preparedness to ensure continued public safety.