Health

Scottish Ebola nurse Pauline Cafferkey recovers from late complication

A Scottish nurse who contracted and recovered from Ebola, but then suffered life-threatening complications from the virus persisting in her brain, has recovered enough to be transferred to a hospital near her home, doctors said on Thursday.

Pauline Cafferkey's condition is stable, hospital says

A Scottish nurse who contracted and recovered from Ebola, but then suffered life-threatening complications from the virus persisting in her brain, has recovered enough to be transferred to a hospital near her home, doctors said on Thursday.

Medics at a specialist unit at the Royal Free Hospital in London, where Pauline Cafferkey was readmitted in October, said she was no longer infectious and had been discharged from there and admitted to a hospital in Glasgow, Scotland.

"Her condition is stable," the London hospital said in a statement.
British nurse Pauline Cafferkey in January 2014. She was recently treated for meningitis that developed as a result of lingering Ebola virus in her system. (Reuters)

Cafferkey, 39, contracted Ebola in December 2014 when she was working in a treatment facility in Sierra Leone at the height of an epidemic of the disease which swept through three countries in West Africa.

Cafferkey initially recovered from the Ebola hemorrhagic fever and was sent home in January.

But in October she fell ill again and doctors found the virus was persisting in tissues in her brain. They later said she had developed meningitis cause by the Ebola virus — the first known such case.

Doctors said in October that Cafferkey was being treated with an experimental antiviral drug known as GS5734 being 
developed by the U.S. drugmaker Gilead Sciences. They gave no update on Thursday about whether they thought the drug had made a difference.

Latest data from the World Health Organization on the West Africa Ebola outbreak show the virus has killed some 11,300 of the more than 28,500 people it has infected since December 2013. 

Sierra Leone was declared free of Ebola on November 7.