Ebola Diagnosed in More Health Care Workers
Virus sickens a nurse’s assistant attending to an Ebola patient in Spain10-7-2014 | Dina Fine Maron
Ebola knows no borders—and frontline aid teams (and even one of their pets) remain in the direct line of contagion.
This reality has become increasingly evident in recent days after one case of Ebola developed in Texas, triggering a massive U.S. public health response, and yesterday a nurse’s assistant in Spain was confirmed as the first person in the current outbreak to have contracted Ebola outside of Africa. In Sierra Leone, meanwhile, a European staffer of one aid organization was reported yesterday as having contracted the disease.
The infection of health care and aid workers is not unexpected for an infectious illness that has already claimed 3,400 lives, among them 200 health workers. The midcourse of the epidemic, however, is not showing signs of infecting other countries in west Africa beyond the three where it has reached epidemic levels. Meanwhile, the U.S. and other governments are taking precautionary steps but avoiding major restrictions on travel and commerce—and global health authorities are trying to tamp down any urge to panic.
The Spanish patient is in stable condition, with no symptoms besides a fever. The announcement by Madrid is only the latest in a string of cases where healthcare workers contracted Ebola in the course of caring for patients, often to the astonishment of the workers themselves who wonder how they may have contracted the illness because, in some cases, they do not recall any close contact without adequate personal protective equipment.