[ 2014-10-07 ]

Ebola reaches Europe as Spanish nurse is infected
A Spanish nurse has become the first person to
test positive for ebola in Europe, raising the
spectre of the deadly virus that has ravaged
Africa spreading rapidly to Britain and other
countries.
In the United States President Obama announced
plans to step up the monitoring of passengers
arriving there.
He criticised governments for not acting as
“aggressively as they need to” when dealing
with an outbreak.
He said: “Countries that think that they can sit
on the sidelines and just let the United States do
it, that will result in a less effective response,
a less speedy response, and that means people will
die.
“And it also means that the potential spread of
the disease beyond these areas in West Africa
becomes more imminent.”
The Spanish authorities said that both tests for
the virus had proved positive, confirming that the
nurse, 44, was infected with the disease, for
which there is no known cure. The woman went to
the Alcorcon hospital in the outskirts of Madrid
yesterday with a high fever.
Health chiefs activated an emergency protocol for
ebola and the nurse was placed in an isolation
ward. “Two tests were done and the two were
positive,” a spokesman for Madrid regional
health department said. The woman, who is married,
was part of a team that had recently treated a
Spanish missionary who was repatriated last month
from Sierra Leone after contracting ebola.
The decision to treat the missionary in Spain
attracted widespread criticism from health
professionals in the country. Manuel García
Viejo, 69, was treated at Carlos III hospital,
Madrid, but died after four days on September 25.
Amyts, a union that represents doctors, called the
repatriation risky, and its president, Daniel
Bernabéu, asked if “anyone could guarantee 100
per cent that the virus wouldn’t escape”.
Mr Bernabéu compared Spain with the US and
pointed out that the Americans had ten hospitals
with the highest level of biosafety possible.
Spain, in contrast, has just one suitable
hospital, with much lower biosafety standards.
The infected nurse has worked for 15 years at the
Carlos III hospital. Staff at the hospital claimed
that the protective suits which they were given
were sub-standard. According to staff, the suits
should include breathing apparatus and must be
completely impermeable. However, they claimed they
were not given their own breathing equipment and
the suits were not impermeable.
When they treated the missionary in September, the
hospital was not evacuated. The sixth floor, where
infected cases were treated, was sealed off. Only
health professionals with a special card were
allowed access to this floor.
Mr García Viejo was infected in Sierra Leone,
where he worked for 12 years. After his death the
nurse went on holiday. The authorities said that
she began to feel unwell on September 30. Thirty
people are under surveillance including members of
her family. Doctors said last night that she was
in a stable condition.
The nurse is the first person to be ­diagnosed
with ebola caught outside West Africa, where the
virus has claimed the lives of 3,338 people in
­Liberia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Guinea and
Senegal. Other cases have involved sufferers who
had travelled from Africa with the virus.
The first man to be diagnosed with the ebola virus
in the United States is critically ill after his
condition worsened yesterday. Thomas Eric Duncan,
from Liberia, is being treated at Texas Health
Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas.
Britain has treated one ebola case so far, William
Pooley, a British nurse who fell ill in Sierra
Leone. He recovered.
Dr Brian McCloskey, of Public Health England,
said: “The UK’s contingency planning for ebola
has always been based on the assumption that there
is a very low, but nevertheless real, risk of
importing a case from West Africa. However, it’s
important to remember that even if cases are
identified here, we have robust, well-developed
and well-tested NHS systems for managing unusual
infectious diseases.”
Experts stressed that people were not going to
catch the virus simply by being on an aircraft
with an infected person.
“This is acquired by close contact with the body
fluids of people that are infected,” Dr Nick
Beeching, senior ­lecturer at the Liverpool
School of Tropical Medicine told the BBC.
“It’s not spread through the air, like let’s
say flu or SARS, so it’s a very different kind
of transmission from those infections.”

Source - The Times(UK)

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