Spain Preparing To Accept Europe’s First Confirmed Ebola Victim

Dr Miguel Pajares(R) treating a patient.

Spain has been preparing to accept Europe’s first confirmed case of the Ebola virus. A medically-equipped military jet has been sent to Liberia to repatriate Miguel Pajares, 75, a Spanish missionary priest working at a hospital in the West African country.
The priest was one of three missionaries to test positive for the virus at the San Jose de Monrovia Hospital in the Liberian capital, Monrovia.

 Brother Pajares and his two fellow workers, Chantal Pascaline Mutwamene of Congo and Paciencia Melgar from Equatorial Guinea, belong to the Hospital Order of San Juan de Dios, a Catholic humanitarian group that runs hospitals around the world, and had been helping to treat patients infected with the virus.

They had been in quarantine since Saturday along with two others – who have since tested negative - following the death of the hospital’s director, Brother Patrick Nshamdze. The priest was due to arrive back in Madrid in the early hours of this morning and would be immediately transferred to the capital’s Carlos III hospital where an isolation ward had been set up in preparation.

The interior of an Airbus A310 of Spanish Air Force 45 Group that has been equipped with appropriate medical and security measures to transfer the priest back to Spain

The priest, who has spent five decades working as a missionary in Liberia, will be treated by only two medical professionals in a bid to contain the risk of virus spreading.

 On Wednesday, a Nigerian nurse became the second confirmed victim to die of the virus in Lagos. She had treated the first victim who died in July. Meanwhile in Saudi Arabia, officials confirmed a man who was being tested for the Ebola virus has died.

The 40-year-old was hospitalised after showing symptoms of the viral hemorrhagic fever after returning from Sierra Leone on Sunday but it has not been confirmed as Ebola. The second American aid worker infected with the virus arrived back in the US on Tuesday and is undergoing treatment at a hospital in Atlanta, Georgia.
Her fellow medical missionary, Dr Kent Brantly, was admitted to the same facility on Sunday. An experimental serum treatment on the US missionaries raised hopes of an effective treatment after doctors reported a “miraculous” improvement in the health of Dr Brantly. Ebola can only be transmitted through direct contact with the bodily fluids of someone carrying the virus, but the incubation period can last up to three weeks. There is no proven vaccine or treatment but WHO said it would convene a meeting of medical ethics experts early next week to consider the implications of making experimental treatments more widely available.

Culled from Telegraph UK