Plane carrying American Ebola patient set to land in US

WASHINGTON, USA – The deadly Ebola virus is set to land on US soil for the first time later Saturday, August 2, when a private jet carrying one of two American aid workers infected by the disease touches down in Georgia, officials said.

Kent Brantly, a doctor who was treating Ebola patients in Liberia, is being ferried back to the United States on board a private jet fitted with a collapsible isolation chamber.

After touching down at a US Air Force base in Georgia later Saturday, Brantly will be transferred to a special care isolation unit at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta.

Brantly, 33, and Christian missionary worker Nancy Writebol are in serious but stable condition after becoming infected as they helped to battle the worst Ebola outbreak in history which has left more than 700 people dead in west Africa since March.

“The plane is en route and Dr Brantly is on board,” Kelly Wells, a spokeswoman for Samaritan’s Purse, the organization Brantly was working for in Africa, told AFP.

The arrival time of the flight was not available.

Both patients are being flown home on a Gulfstream private jet which had been fitted with a collapsible, mobile isolation unit designed to transfer employees from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) exposed to contagious diseases.

Brantly and Writebol are to be treated at Emory’s state-of-the-art isolation unit.

It is one of only 4 facilities in the United States and is located near the CDC headquarters in Atlanta.

“It is physically separate from other patient areas and has unique equipment and infrastructure that provide an extraordinarily high level of clinical isolation,” Emory Healthcare said in a statement.

It is believed to be the first time a patient infected with Ebola has been treated anywhere in the United States.

Anxiety

The arrival of the first case has triggered anxiety in some quarters, with television personality Donald Trump arguing that the patients should be barred from returning to American soil.

But Bruce Ribner, who oversees the isolation unit at Emory, dismissed the criticism of the decision to airlift Brantly and Writebol back to the US.

“They have gone over on a humanitarian mission [and] they have become infected giving medical care,” said Ribner.

“We owe them the right to receive the best medical care that is available.”

The latest outbreak of the hemorrhagic fever in West Africa has killed 729 people of the more than 1,300 infected since March.

The World Health Organization has said the fast-moving outbreak was causing “catastrophic” loss of life in the affected countries of Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone.

Ebola, which has no vaccine, causes severe muscular pain, fever, headaches and, in the worst cases, unstoppable bleeding.

It has killed around two-thirds of those it has infected since its emergence in 1976, with two outbreaks registering fatality rates approaching 90%. – Rappler.com