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A worker from Partners In Health, the prominent American medical aid organization, and an emergency worker from the British military have been infected with the deadly Ebola virus in Sierra Leone, health officials said Thursday.
The Partners In Health worker was the first in that group to be infected since it made an ambitious commitment last fall to help combat Ebola in West Africa, and was the first American health worker in months to get the disease while working in the region. The infections of both the American and Briton served as a reminder that the scourge that has ravaged Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea for the past year is far from defeated, even as the number of new cases has declined drastically.
The National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., said in a statement that the American had been ordered flown back to the United States in isolation on a chartered plane, to be admitted on Friday to the N.I.H. hospital in Bethesda. The statement did not identify the worker by name or affiliation, and the person’s precise condition was not known. But other officials in Sierra Leone confirmed the person had been part of a Partners In Health team caring for Ebola patients in the Port Loko district.
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“They’ve been very great. We are saddened by the fact that one of them has been infected,” said Sidie Tunis, communications director for Sierra Leone’s National Ebola Response Center. “They helped us a lot to control the virus in Sierra Leone. It’s not a pleasant moment for us that one of them is infected.”
Partners In Health, led by Dr. Paul Farmer and Ophelia Dahl, is known for its work in impoverished countries. It opened Ebola treatment units for the first time last year, and has reported sending over 250 American health professionals. In Sierra Leone, the group joined with an existing organization, the Wellbody Alliance, to care for Ebola patients.
The N.I.H. hospital has treated one other Ebola patient: Nina Pham, a nurse infected while caring for a Liberian patient in Dallas. She recovered. Emory University Hospital in Atlanta and Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha have also successfully treated American health workers who were infected in Africa and flown back to the United States.
Earlier Thursday, British officials said a Royal Air Force plane left Sierra Leone carrying three British military health workers, of whom one had tested positive for Ebola. The other two were under observation for signs of infection, officials said. All three were taken to the Royal Free Hospital in northwest London, which has a specialized unit to treat Ebola patients.
The World Health Organization said Thursday that the number of deaths in the Ebola epidemic had surpassed 10,000. While the number of new cases has fallen in all three countries in recent months — and reached zero in Liberia last week — the transmission of the disease has been a resilient problem in the other two.
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