The Spanish government yesterday urged calm as it scrambled to identify people potentially infected by a Madrid nurse suffering from the deadly Ebola virus.
European leaders boosted emergency measures to tackle the outbreak after the nurse became the first person to contract the disease outside of Africa, raising fears of wider contagion.
Doctors in Madrid have hospitalized five others deemed to be at risk of infection and officials said they are monitoring dozens of others.
The worst-ever outbreak of the virus has killed nearly 3,500 people in West Africa so far this year.
Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy called for calm and promised “transparency” over the scare, which has sparked fierce criticism of Spanish health safeguards.
The EU has demanded answers about how the disease was able to spread inside a specialized disease unit, while Spanish health staff protested over safety failures.
The nurse was identified by Spanish media as Teresa Romero, a woman in her 40s who worked at Madrid’s La Paz-Carlos III hospital.
She became ill after caring for two elderly Spanish missionaries who died of Ebola following their return from West Africa. Officials said they were trying to find out who she came into contact with before being isolated on Monday. They said they were monitoring 52 people, mostly health staff.
Romero’s husband, Javier Limon, was quoted by El Mundo newspaper as saying she had stayed “mainly at home” after feeling the first symptoms.
Doctors at the hospital said her husband was also at “high risk” and was put in isolation. Another “suspect case,” an engineer who recently traveled from Nigeria, was being monitored.
The other three patients hospitalized are medical staff from La Paz-Carlos III. The latest of those was admitted yesterday morning, the hospital said.
The European Commission has written to the Spanish Ministry of Health demanding an explanation.
“There is obviously a problem somewhere,” commission spokesman Frederic Vincent said, at a time when all EU member states are supposed to have taken measures to prevent an Ebola outbreak.
Yet Peter Piot, one of the scientists who discovered Ebola, said that though the disease posed a threat to healthcare workers worldwide, there was “no risk that I see for outbreaks” in developed countries.
Spanish officials said Romero began to feel ill on Sept. 30 while on leave after treating the missionaries. Health workers’ unions said Romero had called the Carlos III hospital when she felt ill, but was first referred back to a local health center. Doctors said she was not admitted sd she did not have a high fever or other Ebola symptoms.
Rajoy said the top priority was to treat the infected patient and secondly to monitor people who had been in contact with her.
Officials would meanwhile “investigate what happened and why this contagion occurred,” he told parliament.
The WHO ays Ebola is believed to have killed more than 600 people in Sierra Leone, where there have been more than 2,100 cases.
The EU announced it will airlift 100 tonnes of relief aid tomorrow to Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, while dozens of British troops are due to fly to Sierra Leone next week to help build medical facilities.
In Sierra Leone, the Broadcasting Corp reported yesterday that bodies of Ebola victims have been left in the country’s streets because of a strike by burial teams, who complain they have not been paid.
Sierra Leone Ministry of Health spokesman Sidie Yahya Tunis said the situation is “very embarrassing,” insisting money was available to pay the teams.
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