The Scottish nurse who contracted the Ebola virus in west Africa will be treated with an experimental anti-viral drug and blood plasma from a survivor of the disease, her doctor said.
Dr Michael Jacobs, who leads the team treating Pauline Cafferkey at the Royal Free hospital in London, said she was “as well as we could hope for” and was sitting up in an isolation tent and able to eat, read and talk.
Her family have been able to visit her since she was admitted to the hospital on Tuesday morning after becoming the first person diagnosed with Ebola on UK soil.
The update on Cafferkey’s condition came as health chiefs vowed to review screening measures after it emerged that she had raised concerns about her health to Heathrow officials upon returning from Sierra Leone on Sunday night. She was cleared to fly after passing several temperature tests but was diagnosed with Ebola the following day at Gartnavel hospital in Glasgow.
The 39-year-old nurse contracted the virus while carrying out a five-week volunteer placement at a treatment centre in Kerry Town, Sierra Leone, for Save the Children. Dr Michael Jacobs declined to name the anti-viral drug that will be used to treat Cafferkey, but said it was incredibly safe despite being “not proven to work.
“At the moment, we don’t know what the best treatment strategies are. That’s why we’re calling them experimental treatments,” he said.we can’t be as confident as we would like. There’s obviously very good reason to believe it’s going to help her, otherwise we wouldn’t be using it at all, but we simply don’t have enough information to know that’s the case.”
Jacobs also declined to confirm whether she would receive the convalescent plasma from British Ebola survivor William Pooley, who was cured of the virus by a nursing team led by Jacobs at the Royal Free in September.
Pooley banked 1.2 litres of his plasma to help future Ebola patients before leaving for Freetown in October. Doctors do not need to seek his consent before using his plasma either for research or to treat a patient.
Six other Ebola survivors have been treated in European hospitals, including a Spanish nurse, a Norwegian doctor and a Ugandan medic treated in Germany.
In September, Pooley’s plasma was used to treat Dr Ian Crozier, a World Health Organisation doctor who worked at the same government hospital in Sierra Leone and who contracted the virus weeks after Pooley. He went on to survive, spending 40 days in hospital.
Jacobs said the hospital had been unable to obtain the experimental drug ZMapp, which was used to treat Pooley, because there was simply none in the world at the moment.
culled
