The risk to the wider UK public from Ebola remains low while a British doctor receives specialist care in London, the UK Health Security Agency has said.
A humanitarian organisation had deployed the healthcare worker to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to help tackle an outbreak declared by the country’s health ministry on 15 May. The doctor tested positive while working on the response, and the UK government confirmed that the patient would be evacuated for specialist treatment.
The patient arrived at RAF Northolt on Thursday aboard a medical evacuation flight organised through a joint effort involving the UK and DR Congo governments and international health partners. Three large police vans, two ambulances and another support car then carried the man in a convoy to the Royal Free Hospital.
The patient is being treated in the hospital’s specialised high-level isolation unit in Hampstead, north London, which is designed for infectious diseases including Ebola. The Royal Free successfully treated three health workers evacuated from the West Africa Ebola outbreak in 2014 and 2015.
This is the first case of a British national contracting Ebola during the current outbreak. The outbreak has surpassed 10,000 confirmed cases and more than 5,000 deaths, making it the largest and deadliest in DR Congo’s history. Its fatality rate stood at 48.6% at the end of last month.
The outbreak is caused by the Bundibugyo variant and has spread to Kenya, Uganda and Nigeria, with cases also confirmed in France. There is no approved vaccine for the variant. The World Health Organisation said experts had recommended adding two new candidate drugs to an ongoing clinical trial, including vaccines developed by the University of Oxford and the Serum Institute of India, and another by Moderna.
People infected with an orthoebolavirus usually become ill between two and 21 days after contact. Ebola can cause severe illness and death. Vomiting and diarrhoea can appear early, before the disease progresses in some cases to organ failure and internal bleeding.
Britain has previously recorded four confirmed Ebola cases: one linked to a laboratory needle incident in 1976, and three involving health workers who responded to the West Africa outbreak between 2014 and 2015. Imported cases are extremely rare in the UK and have caused no deaths.
Dr Renu Bindra, the UK Health Security Agency’s deputy director for all-hazards public health response, said: “UKHSA and the NHS have well-established and robust infection prevention and control protocols to limit the risk of onward transmission, and the risk to the wider public remains low.”
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