A British military healthcare worker who suffered a needlestick injury while treating an Ebola patient in Sierra Leone has been evacuated to the UK.
The healthcare worker arrived back in the UK on Saturday on an RAF flight and is being assessed at the specialist isolation unit at the Royal Free hospital in north London.
The hospital said the patient has not tested positive for Ebola and was showing no signs of the deadly virus.
“We can confirm that a UK military healthcare worker has been admitted to the Royal Free hospital today following a needlestick injury while treating a person with Ebola in Sierra Leone,” it said in a statement.
“The individual is likely to have been exposed to the Ebola virus but has not been diagnosed with Ebola and does not have symptoms.”
Public Health England (PHE) said the individual had been exposed to the virus in a “frontline care setting”. The patient will be monitored for the remainder of their 21-day incubation period. Next of kin have been informed.
PHE’s director for health protection and medical director, Prof Paul Cosford, expressed confidence that all appropriate precautionary measures had been taken.
“Our thoughts are with this person, who has been courageous in helping those affected in west Africa, and in preventing the wider spread of Ebola,” he said.
“We have strict, well-tested protocols in place for this eventuality and we are confident that all appropriate actions have been taken to support the healthcare worker concerned and to protect the health of other people.”
A needlestick injury while treating an Ebola patient carries a high risk of infection as the disease is communicated through body fluids.
It is believed the medic would have been working at the Kerry Town treatment centre and that the injury would have happened within the last 48 hours. This is the period when someone with known exposure to Ebola would have had a window of opportunity to be safely transported to the UK as they are not yet contagious. It is believed the military transport, bringing the patient back as a precautionary measure, arrived at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire in the early hours of Saturday morning.
The Kerry Town complex includes an 80-bed treatment centre to be managed by Save the Children and a 12-bed centre staffed by British army medics specifically for health care workers and international staff responding to the Ebola crisis.
The worker is the third person to be treated at the Royal Free for Ebola, or suspected Ebola.
Last week Pauline McCafferkey, a NHS nurse who volunteered to work in the Save the Children hospital in Freetown, was discharged after spending three and a half weeks in the isolation unit.
Her condition became critical within days of her admission, and this weekinfectious disease consultant Dr Michael Jacobs credited the “amazing” 33 NHS staff on his team for saving her life.
Last year Will Pooley, a nurse who was living in Sierra Leone, contracted Ebola at a government hospital. He was evacuated and recovered from the disease within a week.
The Save the Children hospital in Kerry Town was built by the British military and includes a 12-bed unit run by the army which is designed to treat international healthcare workers.
