Dr. Rick Sacra is returning to Liberia after a surviving a battle with the deadly Ebola virus.
Sacra, 52, was a family physician from Massachusetts who survived Ebola. He underwent treatment at the Nebraska Medical Center after contracting the virus while treating patients in Liberia. He was released on Sept. 26.
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According to the AP, an Italian doctor who contracted Ebola while working in Sierra Leone arrived in Italy and is being treated with the same experimental drugs used in the U.S. and other European countries.
Rome doctors declined to identify the antiviral drug used for treatment, though they said the drug has been used before in the U.S. and Europe.
The doctor, whose name wasn’t released, is in his 50s and has Italy’s first confirmed case of Ebola. He arrived at a Rome military air base early Tuesday and was transported in a hazard-safe equipped ambulance to Lazzaro Spallanzani hospital, a Rome hospital that specializes in infectious diseases.
His condition is ’’stable,’’ doctor Emanuele Nicastri said at a press conference at the hospital. ’’He’s conscious and collaborating’’ with the medical team.
More than 15,000 people have been infected with Ebola and 5,420 have died, according to the World Health Organization.
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According to Boston.com and The New York Times, Dr. Craig Spencer, the New York City-based doctor who contracted Ebola after treating patients in Sierra Leone with Doctors Without Borders, will be released from Bellevue Hospital Tuesday morning in New York City.
Dr. Spencer was diagnosed with Ebola on Oct. 23 at Bellevue after 10 days of self-monitoring.
According to ABC News, a local doctor in Sierra Leone has died of Ebola. ABC claims he was the fifth local doctor in the West African nation to die of the disease.
ABC: “The death of Dr. Godfrey George, medical superintendent of Kambia Government Hospital in northern Sierra Leone, was a blow to efforts to keep desperately needed health care workers safe in a country ravaged by the deadly virus.”
Sierra Leone’s small health care system has been strained by the virus, making it difficult to care for patients.
Its health care system was already fragile before the Ebola epidemic because of past conflict and a lack of resources.
The country had two doctors for every 100,000 people in 2010, compared to about 240 doctors for every 100,000 people in the United States, according to the World Health Organization.
George’s overnight death was announced by Dr. Brima Kargbo, Sierra Leone’s chief medical officer. George had been driven to the capital, Freetown, after reporting that he was not feeling well.
Doctors and nurses have been particularly vulnerable to contracting Ebola, as the virus is spread through bodily fluids. WHO chief Margaret Chan has talked about the disease’s “heavy toll on frontline domestic medical staff.”
A nurse’s release Tuesday from an Atlanta hospital leaves a single person in the United States now battling Ebola, though she and others — including President Barack Obama — stressed the fight against the deadly virus isn’t over.
“While this is a day for celebration and gratitude, I ask that we not lose focus on the thousands of families who continue to labor under the burden of this disease in West Africa,” said 29-year-old Amber Vinson.
Smiling broadly and occasionally brushing aside tears, Vinson was surrounded by relatives as well as Emory doctors and nurses.
Nurse Nina Pham from Dallas, who also had Ebola, was released Oct. 24 from a National Institutes of Health hospital in Bethesda, Md.
Meanwhile, on Monday, Kaci Hickox traveled from New Jersey to Maine, where her boyfriend is a senior nursing student at the University of Maine at Fort Kent. Hickox, who spent the weekend in a quarantine tent in New Jersey, said she never had Ebola symptoms and tested negative in a preliminary evaluation. She also sharply criticized New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo for ordering mandatory quarantines.
Hickox, told CNN that her “basic human rights have been violated,” and was released Monday, two days after testing negative for Ebola. She was seemingly powerless to challenge her banishment to a quarantine tent in Newark.
The nurse’s treatment, as well as the quarantine policies of New York and New Jersey, have been criticized as heavy-handed.
Former Ebola patient Rick Sacra, a doctor infected in Liberia, likened the mandatory quarantine for returning health-care workers in New York and New Jersey to a “police state approach.”
OK, Fine. 