British Ebola Patient Discharged

29-year-old William Pooley,the first British person to contract Ebola during the outbreak in West Africa has been discharged from hospital after making a full recovery.

He has been treated in a special isolation unit at the Royal Free Hospital in London.

Mr Pooley was given the experimental drug ZMapp and has praised the “world class” care at the hospital.

The volunteer nurse was in one of the worst affected countries, Sierra Leone, when he contracted the virus.

He is unsure when he became infected, but started feeling sick and needed a blood test.

He recalled the moment his fears were confirmed: “I was woken early that evening by one of the World Health Organization doctors and immediately I knew it was bad news.
“I was worried that I was going to die, I was worried about my family and I was scared.”

He was flown back to the UK by the RAF on Sunday 24 August.

Mr Pooley was in the earlier stages of the disease. He had a high temperature but was not bleeding.
He said: “I was very lucky in several ways; firstly in the standard of care I received, which is a world apart from what people are receiving in West Africa at the moment.

“And my symptoms never progressed to the worst stage of the disease, I’ve seen people dying horrible deaths, I had some unpleasant symptoms, but nothing compared to the worst of the disease.”

He was treated with the experimental Ebola drug ZMapp, a 12-hour infusion of antibodies, that has been given to only six other patients.

It is not clear if the infusion helped, but levels of the virus in his bloodstream did fall significantly after the treatment.

Dr Michael Jacobs, an infectious diseases consultant at the hospital, said: “He is not infectious to anyone else now. The virus is cleared from the body, and there is no risk to the wider community in any way.”

He said the isolation unit Mr Pooley had been kept in was going through chemical decontamination.

“This unit is always there, it’s business-as-usual for us, we were prepared for this to happen and we’re prepared if it happens again.”