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A surgeon working in West Africa's Sierra Leone has
been diagnosed with Ebola and will be flown to the United States for treatment
on Saturday, according to a person in the federal government with direct
knowledge of the case.
The surgeon, Dr. Martin Salia, will be treated at the
Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, the person said. A Sierra Leone citizen, the
44-year-old Salia lives in Maryland and is a legal permanent U.S. resident,
according to the person, who was not authorized to release the information and
spoke on condition of anonymity
The doctor will be the third Ebola patient at the
Omaha hospital and the 10th person with Ebola to be treated in the U.S. The
last, Dr. Craig Spencer, was released from a New York hospital on Tuesday.
In a statement Thursday, the Nebraska Medical Center
said it had no official confirmation that it would be treating another patient,
but that an Ebola patient in Sierra Leone would be evaluated for possible
transport to the hospital. The patient would arrive Saturday afternoon.
Salia is a general surgeon who had been working at
Kissy United Methodist Hospital in the Sierra Leone capital of Freetown,
according to the person familiar with the case. He came down with symptoms of
Ebola on Nov. 6 but test results were negative for the virus. He was tested
again on Monday, and he tested positive. Salia is in stable condition at an
Ebola treatment center in Freetown. It wasn't clear whether he had been
involved in the care of Ebola patients.
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In this Oct.
28, 2006, file photo, a mock patient is wheeled in an isolation pod during a
drill at the Nebraska biocontainment unit in the Nebraska Medical Center in
Omaha, Neb. (AP Photo/Nati Harnik)
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Sierra Leone is one of the three West Africa nations
hit hard by an Ebola epidemic this year. The disease has killed more than 5,000
people, mostly in Sierra Leona, Guinea and Liberia.
The State Department said in a statement late
Thursday, that along with the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, it
had been in touch with the Maryland wife of an unidentified Ebola patient about
transferring him to the Nebraska Medical Center for care.
The hospital in Omaha is one of four U.S. hospitals
with specialized treatment units for people with highly dangerous infectious
diseases. It was chosen for the latest patient because workers at units at
Atlanta's Emory University Hospital and the National Institutes of Health near
Washington are still in a 21-day monitoring period.
Those two hospitals treated two Dallas nurses who were
infected while caring for Thomas Eric Duncan, a Liberian man who fell ill with
Ebola shortly after arriving in the U.S. and later died.
The
other eight Ebola patients in the U.S. recovered, including the nurses. Five
were American aid workers who became infected in West Africa while helping care
for patients there; one was a video journalist.
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