The first of two American aid workers infected with the deadly Ebola virus while in Liberia left the West African country headed for the US yesterday, where he will be treated in isolation at an Atlanta hospital, officials said.
The plane carrying Dr Kent Brantly was expected to arrive in Atlanta later yesterday, according to a spokesperson for the North Carolina-based Christian organization Samaritan’s Purse, for whom Brantly worked.
He will then be taken to Emory University Hospital for treatment in an isolated and specially equipped room.
The second Samaritan’s Purse staff member, missionary Nancy Writebol, is due to be carried on a later flight, as the plane is only equipped to carry one patient at a time.
“We have learned that we will be receiving a patient with Ebola at Emory University Hospital on Saturday,” Holly Korschun, spokeswoman for the facility where they will be treated, said on Friday. She added the second patient would follow in the next few days.
The patients were helping respond to the worst West African Ebola outbreak on record with the North Carolina-based Christian organisation Samaritan’s Purse and missionary group SIM USA when they contracted the disease. Since February, more than 700 people in the region have died from the infection.
The fatality rate in the current epidemic is about 60 per cent
Despite alarm by some in the US over bringing Ebola patients to the country, health officials have said bringing the sickened aid workers into the country would not put the public at risk.
The facility at Emory, set up with the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, is one of only four in the country set up to deal with such cases. It is physically separate from other patient areas, providing a high level of clinical isolation.
“We have a specially designed unit, which is highly contained. We have highly trained personnel who know how to safely enter the room of a patient who requires this form of isolation,” Bruce Ribner, an infectious disease specialist at Emory, said on Friday.
Ribner said he hoped the medical support available at Emory could improve the chances of survival from that seen on the ground in West Africa.
The hemorrhagic virus can kill up to 90 per cent of those who become infected, and the fatality rate in the current epidemic is about 60 per cent.
Brantly, a 33-year-old father of two young children, and Writebol, a 59-year-old mother of two, will arrive at Dobbins Air Reserve Base outside Atlanta before being transported to Emory.