By Matthew Green

NYERI, Kenya (Reuters) - Kenyan health workers said on Tuesday they were on alert for an outbreak of the deadly ebola virus as officials investigated what might be the country's first recorded case of the killer disease.

Hospital staff called a team of government researchers to investigate after a woman died in the central town of Nyeri last week from a feverish illness with symptoms reminiscent of ebola.

``We are still crossing our fingers that we are not dealing with Ebola (news - web sites), but we may be proved wrong,'' said a source close to the investigation in Nyeri in Kenya's highlands.

``You pray she died alone -- it would be tragic, not just for her, but for many people,'' he said.

The 24-year old trainee policewoman died on April 2 after ''bleeding from body openings and vomiting blood,'' according to Kenya's Ministry of Health, which has alerted the World Health Organization (news - web sites) in Geneva.

Local health workers said ebola was low on the list of possible causes of the woman's death, but they were taking no chances after an outbreak of the virus killed more than 170 people in neighboring Uganda last September.

An outbreak of ebola, which can cause massive internal bleeding and has no known cure, could devastate Kenya's tourist trade, a backbone of the economy and its second largest foreign exchange earner after tea.

Thomas Matenjwa, administrator at the hospital where the woman died, said gowns, masks and chemicals had been delivered as a precaution against an possible outbreak of the disease, which was first recognized near the Ebola river in what was then northern Zaire in 1976.

A 19-year old student from the same police training college as the dead woman was being kept at the hospital under observation and isolation as a precaution, Matenjwa said, although he was believed to be suffering from typhoid.

``We have one confirmed typhoid case,'' he said. ``With typhoid and ebola, some symptoms are the same. We always treat any typhoid now as a suspect of ebola.''

The source in Nyeri said the woman's husband came from western Kenya near the border with Uganda, and although she had been at the college since mid-February, she had received a visit from her husband shortly before her death.

He said it would be three weeks before they could be certain that the woman had not infected anybody else, while her parents and husband were under surveillance.

Health workers said researchers in Kenya, South Africa and the United States should be able to shed light on the cause of the woman's death after conducting tests on blood and tissue taken at an autopsy carried out on Friday, with results due around April 24.

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