A health worker arrived at a London hospital from Scotland early yesterday to be treated for Ebola after on Monday becoming the first person diagnosed with the virus in Britain.
The woman contracted the disease in West Africa. She arrived at the capital’s Royal Free hospital — Britain’s designated Ebola treatment center — in an ambulance accompanied by several police vehicles, a witness said.
“We think so far, certainly the clinical care for her is going as expected,” Paul Cosford, director for health protection at Public Health England, the government body handling Britain’s Ebola response, told BBC radio.
The hospital’s “high-level isolation unit” will allow doctors to treat the patient while she lies inside a plastic tent, limiting the scope for the disease to be passed to medical staff.
The WHO on Monday said that the number of people infected in the three west African countries worst affected by the outbreak — Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea — had passed 20,000, with more than 7,842 deaths so far.
The UK National Health Service worker, who had been working in west Africa with the Save the Children charity, flew from Sierra Leone to Glasgow late on Sunday on a British Airways flight via Casablanca, Morocco, and London’s Heathrow Airport.
She was diagnosed with the deadly virus on Monday after developing symptoms overnight and was initially treated at Scotland’s Gartnavel Hospital.
“I’m satisfied ... that the procedures, the protocols, the things that we’ve been practicing now for months and months have now kicked in,” British Secretary of State for Health Jeremy Hunt said.
Scottish authorities have said the illness was diagnosed early, meaning the risk to others is considered extremely low, but that they are investigating all possible contacts with the patient.
Earlier this year the Royal Free hospital successfully treated another British aid worker, William Pooley, who was flown home for treatment after being diagnosed with the virus in Sierra Leone.
Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said a second patient in Scotland was being tested for the virus after returning from west Africa, but had a low probability of being sick, having had no known contact with infected people.
A third person is undergoing tests in Cornwall, England, and being treated in an isolation unit, Public Health England said.
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