Britain flies Ebola-infected healthcare worker home from Congo
First British case in an outbreak that has killed five thousand of more than ten thousand infected, medevacs run to European isolation units while Congolese nurses face mobs
Images
The patient, whose identity was not disclosed, had been sent to DR Congo by a humanitarian organisation to help support the response to the outbreak. Photograph: Sebastien Kitsa Musayi/AP
theguardian.com
A British healthcare worker who contracted Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo is being flown home for treatment, the first British case in an outbreak that has now killed five thousand of more than ten thousand infected. The government confirmed on Wednesday that a British citizen in the DRC had tested positive. The patient, sent to Congo by a humanitarian organisation to help with the outbreak response, is in stable condition and will travel by specialist ambulance to what an official document seen by Reuters describes as a high-consequence infectious disease unit.
The receiving machinery is established. The Royal Free hospital in London runs a high-level isolation unit for diseases such as Ebola, with further centres in Newcastle and Liverpool, and the UK Health Security Agency counts four confirmed Ebola cases in Britain since 1976. The outbreak itself, declared on 15 May, is Congo's seventeenth since the virus was identified and now the country's largest and deadliest — caused by the Bundibugyo strain, which has no approved treatment, with vaccine trials still under way. It has since spread to Kenya and Uganda, and Nigeria recorded a case in Abuja last month in a woman who arrived from Uganda.
Since the outbreak began, a Nigerian patient and a close contact have been flown to Switzerland, two other patients to Germany and one to the Netherlands, and France recorded a case in July. In eastern Congo, mobs have killed local health workers accused of spreading the virus through toilets and rivers.
Dr Jean Kaseya, director general of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, told the Guardian last month that the outbreak's geographic extension was unprecedented — the first time three African regions have been affected — and that countries "are not safe if they don't take appropriate measures." British health authorities say the risk to the wider public from imported cases remains low.
Around half of those infected have died. The British patient is stable.