The emergency services in Rotterdam were on high alert on Wednesday after a woman reported to a local hospital suffering from symptoms which could have been ebola.

Several dozen people who had been in contact with the woman were placed in temporary quarantine but the incident at the Maasstad hospital turned out to be a false alarm.

The woman at the centre of the scare had just arrived from Congo, but not the area where ebola was found, according to the public health institute RIVM.

‘She had been sick for around three days, with a high temperature and vomiting, before she got on the plane,’ hospital spokesman Jan den Hollander told broadcaster NOS.

The hospital has had a special protocol to deal with suspected cases of ebola since 2014.