A police officer wearing a protective mask leaves the employment center in Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg district, where a woman received medical treatment after showing symptoms of an infectious disease. Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

BERLIN—A German woman recently returned from an African country affected by Ebola collapsed in a Berlin job center on Tuesday showing symptoms of an infectious disease, German police said, as emergency services cordoned off the center for several hours.

The woman, who is aged around 30, is being tested in Berlin's Charité hospital, fire department spokesman Rolf Erbe said, adding that emergency workers also took two people who were in contact with the patient to hospital.

A fire department doctor said testing would take several hours. A spokesman for the Charité said the hospital would issue a statement later Tuesday. If confirmed, the case would be the first Ebola infection in Germany.

The rapid security deployment around the job center and the decision to seal off the building underline the alertness of emergency services in Europe, as the weeks-old outbreak of Ebola in western Africa continues to elude confinement.

The emergency services in Berlin initially asked 600 people who were at the employment center when the emergency call was made to stay inside, police spokesman Thomas Neuendorf said. Police took the personal details of bystanders on the same floor as the patient.

Vivi Jost, a young woman leaving the job center, said she was held for three hours, and she described the atmosphere on the seventh floor of the building as relaxed. Another woman leaving the building with her child said people on the first floor were frightened. She said the patient had been on the second floor.

State and national health authorities had no immediate comment on the incident. A spokeswoman for Germany's health ministry said the country was "well prepared" should an Ebola infection be confirmed, with eight treatment centers for patients with highly infectious diseases across the country.

Tuesday's developments come less than a week after the foreign ministry advised Germans to leave several West African countries in the grip of the Ebola outbreak. More than 1,100 people have died from the Ebola outbreak across Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone.

German media have reported on suspected cases of Ebola in Frankfurt and Hamburg among travelers from African countries in recent weeks, but the patients tested negative for the deadly virus at local hospitals, according to the reports.

According to the Robert Koch Institute, Germany's institution responsible for disease control and prevention, there are around 40 cases of malaria reported in Germany every month in the summer period in travelers returning from West Africa.

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