Ebola Virus Disease Infects USA Health Worker; Admitted at NIH Clinical Center

• comments
• 
• 

According to USA Today, an America health care worker, who tested positive for the Ebola virus, has probably just arrived at National Institutes of Health and is currently receiving treatment.  

The National Institutes of Health adds that the worker might have been infected while volunteering at an Ebola treatment unit located in Sierra Leone. As soon as the patient tested positive for the disease, the worker was put in isolation and transported back to the U.S. via chartered aircraft.  

After being admitted, the patient has already started treatment at the NIH Clinical Center Special Clinical Studies Unit. USA Today explains that the unit is one of several units in the U.S., which are designed to treat infectious diseases, such as Ebola.  

The facilities at the NIH special unit have "high-level isolation capabilities," states the facility's website. In addition, infectious disease experts and critical care specialists make up the unit's staff.  

According to USA Today, three other patients were treated for Ebola at the NIH Special Clinical Studies Unit. The first was Nina Pham, who is believed to have been infected while working in Dallas with the first Ebola patients that arrived in the USA. Pham was treated successfully and released free of the virus, reports the NIH site.  

Meanwhile, the other two patients that were admitted to the NIH special unit were thought to have contracted the virus while working in a high-risk exposure area in West Africa. The NIH site reports that the two patients were not actually infected with Ebola and released from the facility.  

According to USA Today, the health worker, who worked in Leone, is the 11th person in the States to be treated with Ebola. The site adds that the NIH Clinical Center is not the only medical facility that has treated the virus. 

Ebola patients were also treated at Atlanta's Emory Hospital, Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha and Bellevue Hospital in New York.

According to the World Health Organization, Sierra Leone and Guinea has reported new cases of Ebola just last week, and there has been no new cases of ebola in Liberia in the last two weeks. The number of patients who contracted ebola has declined since the outbreak last summer.

As for the healthcare worker, no further information has been released.