Updated 9.20pm

A patient in Sweden who was admitted to hospital with a suspected case of Ebola, was found not to be suffering from the highly infectious and potentially fatal disease, health care officials said Friday.

"The young man... who had symptoms... is not suffering from Ebola. That is what the result of tests shows," the health authorities in Uppsala,  about 70 kilometres north of Stockholm, said in a statement 

"The patient came in this morning. He was throwing up blood and had bloody stools," which can be a symptom of Ebola, Mikael Kohler, a medical director for Uppsala Region, told AFP earlier.

The young man, whose identity has not been released, lives in Sweden and had returned from a trip to Burundi three weeks ago but was not known to have visited any Ebola-contaminated area, Kohler said.

The symptoms first appeared on Friday morning.

An Ebola outbreak ravaging eastern areas of the Democratic Republic of Congo has claimed several hundred lives. It is the 10th such outbreak in the DRC since the disease was first detected there in 1976.

Ebola is a haemorrhagic fever that spreads rapidly by contact with the body fluids of an infected person, causing internal bleeding and potentially death.

Sweden has one specialised isolation unit able to treat patients with highly infectious diseases such as Ebola, located at Linkoping University Hospital some 200 kilometres southwest of Stockholm.