Spanish aid worker repatriated after high-risk contact with Ebola patient in Mali
Friday, November 21, 2014 @ 2:37 PM
A SPANISH aid worker suspected to be at risk of having contracted Ebola in Mali has been repatriated and is under observation at Madrid’s Carlos III hospital.
The Navarra-born woman works for the charity Doctors Without Borders and had been treating patients in Bamako, Mali, one of the focal points in the African country which has seen an outbreak of the deadly haemorrhagic virus and to which the Spanish foreign office is currently advising against all travel.
Whilst injecting a patient with Ebola at a hospital in Bamako, the doctor accidentally pricked herself with the needle.
She is not displaying any symptoms at present, which means even if she has Ebola she cannot pass it on to anyone at this stage since it only becomes infectious once signs of it begin to appear.
Medic and member of the new and dedicated Ebola committee Fernando Simón says the likelihood of the doctor being infected is ‘difficult to ascertain at the moment’ but is ‘relatively high’.
She has been brought back to Spain as a precaution only at present, the fourth person to be repatriated with confirmed or suspected Ebola.
Two missionary doctors, Miguel Pajares, 75, working in the Liberian capital of Monrovia, and Manuel García Viejo, 69, treating patients in Sierra Leone both died within days of reaching Spain.
Read more at thinkSPAIN.com