British health worker with Ebola flown home from DR Congo
A British healthcare worker who tested positive for Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo is being evacuated to the UK, the first British national infected in the current outbreak, which has killed more than 5,000 people. The patient is in a stable condition and will be taken by specialist ambulance to a high-consequence infectious disease unit, according to an official document seen by Reuters. The government says the risk to the public “remains low”.
“The UK has well-established procedures for dealing with cases like this, and those processes have been activated,” a government spokesperson said. The Royal Free in London has a high-level isolation unit, with others in Newcastle and Liverpool; the patient was sent to Congo by a humanitarian organisation and was expected to arrive on Wednesday or Thursday. Only four Ebola cases have ever been confirmed in Britain — one from a laboratory incident in 1976 and three health workers returning from west Africa in 2014–15 — and none proved fatal. The outbreak, declared on 15 May, has passed 10,000 confirmed cases, with a fatality rate of 48.6% reported at the end of October; it is the seventeenth in Congo’s history and the second deadliest ever recorded. It is driven by the Bundibugyo strain, for which there is no approved vaccine, though two candidates — one from Oxford and the Serum Institute of India, one from Moderna — are to join a clinical trial. Cases have been confirmed in Kenya, Uganda and Nigeria.