With the FIFA World Cup games just weeks away, soccer fever is rapidly spreading.But with more than 230,000 daily visitors expected in Toronto for the games, health officials are worried about a different kind of spread — infectious diseases like measles, mpox, and most recently, Ebola.On Tuesday, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said the “scale and speed” of a rare type of Ebola in eastern Congo was “deeply” concerning, with at least 134 deaths and more than 500 suspected cases.The WHO proclaimed the epidemic a public health emergency of international concern.On Wednesday night, a spokesperson for Ontario’s Minister of Health, Sylvia Jones, confirmed that a patient who recently travelled to East Africa is now in an Ontario hospital being assessed for “a range of possible” infections, including the Ebola virus.Earlier Wednesday, an Air France flight bound for Detroit was diverted to Montreal on Wednesday afternoon due to concerns that one of the passengers on board may have been exposed to the Ebola virus.All of this comes as hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world are about to head to Toronto and Vancouver for the World Cup Games.Despite the conspicuous timing, Toronto’s Medical Officer of Health, Dr. Michelle Murti, says the city is prepared.“We’ve been practicing for FIFA for a long time already, so something like Ebola was always on our radar to say, ‘could that be a risk in terms of that many travellers coming to the city?’ Certainly, the developments in the last weeks have ramped that up, and that risk has changed, particularly as the WHO has declared it a public health emergency of international concern.”“At home in Toronto our key focus of the work is that we are prepared, we will be able to receive a patient if we had somebody who did develop symptoms of Ebola, we have those processes in place to bring them to appropriate care, make sure that we are preventing a spread of that infection to anyone else in the city and that we are doing that active monitoring to anybody that’s been exposed.”Murti, however, says there’s only so much that can be done on the municipal level, and it will take measures from all levels of government to keep the public safe.“We are going to be a little bit reliant on our federal partners as well, who are going to be having to screen people who would be coming into the country from other countries, to say, ‘could you have potentially been exposed? Did you travel to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, or that part of the world?”The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) says there are currently no travel-related health measures specific for Ebola at Canada’s borders, but said it will monitor and update public health interventions as needed, including with respect to the upcoming FIFA World Cup.“Canada will continue to implement appropriate health protocols should a case be imported to Canada,” PHAC said in an updated statement leading up to the FIFA games.Ebola is highly contagious and can be contracted via bodily fluids such as vomit, blood or semen. The disease it causes is rare but severe and often fatal. Symptoms include fever, headache, muscle pain, weakness, diarrhea, vomiting, stomach pain and unexplained bleeding or bruising.Despite escalating Ebola anxiety, there’s a plethora of other infections that Toronto will be monitoring.“Once they (FIFA tourists) are here, we are doing a number of things to increase our surveillance for all kinds of infectious diseases … we are going to be doing extra wastewater surveillance at the games, at the site of the FanFest and at the (Toronto) Stadium to look for things like measles, norovirus, mpox virus,” Murti said.Murti adds that there’s currently no wastewater screening for Ebola due to the nature of the virus.“One of things about Ebola is that people are not infectious until they are symptomatic so one of our key messages to anybody coming to the games is if you’re sick please stay home. “We know you’ve paid a lot of money to come to the games to be part of this but if you are sick please stay at home that is one of the best ways we can prevent any type of illness transmission at the games.”