Fig. 1

The prevalence of HIV among EBOV-negative EVD-suspected cases tested at Sierra Leone-China Friendship Biological Safety Laboratory, Sierra Leone, 2015. After its establishment in early 2015, the Sierra Leone-China Friendship Biological Safety Laboratory was responsible for EBOV testing of EVD-suspected patients from most districts of the country. From March to November 2015, 678 individuals were excluded from EBOV infection by real-time PCR method. HIV antibodies in the sera were tested using ELISA (with kits from Beijing Wantai Biological Pharmacy Enterprise Co., Ltd., Beijing, China, and positive cases were confirmed using kits from Zhuhai Livzon Diagnostics Inc., Zhuhai, China). The significant decreases (P < 0.001 in Chi-square tests) in HIV prevalence ratio among the Ebola RNA negative suspected Ebola cases in each month are shown as brown lines and diamond symbols. The monthly reported number of Ebola cases in Sierra Leone by the WHO are shown as blue lines and diamond symbols (http://apps.who.int/gho/data/view.ebola-sitrep.ebola-summary-latest?lang=en) and were significantly correlated with the reported monthly number of Ebola cases (r = 0.745, P = 0.034) using Pearson’s correlation coefficient analyses. EBOV: Ebola virus; EVD: Ebola virus disease; PCR: Polymerase chain reaction; ELISA: Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay