Passengers on Flight With Ebola Patient Contacted

 

Ebola Patient Robert Booth, The Guardian, January 5, 2015

Every passenger who flew between London and Glasgow with the Scottish Ebola patient, Pauline Cafferkey, has now been traced, health officials in Edinburgh have said.

The last 15 of the 70 passengers on the British Airways flight carrying the volunteer nurse, who flew home from assignment at an Ebola clinic in Sierra Leone on 28 December, were tracked down on New Year’s Eve. Eight passengers who were sitting in the two rows in front and two rows behind Cafferkey on the Heathrow to Glasgow flight BA1478 have been requested to take their temperature for 20 days.

If they display any symptoms of fever or high temperature, they must call an NHS hotline, a spokeswoman for the NHS in Scotland said. They have been reassured that the risk of having contracted the disease is negligible. NHS Scotland declined to comment on whether anyone had reported high temperatures or fever.

The tracing was carried out by Health Protection Scotland after criticism of the procedures that allowed Cafferkey on the Glasgow-bound plane after she had complained to public health staff at Heathrow that she felt feverish and had her temperature checked six times. The Westminster government’s chief medical officer, Dame Sally Davies, said reports of queues for screening and equipment shortages at the airport were “unacceptable” and earlier this week announced a review of procedures before the next batch of volunteer medical workers return from west Africa in mid-January.

On Thursday Cafferkey, a community nurse from Blantyre in South Lanarkshire who worked at a Save the Children treatment centre in Kerry Town in Sierra Leone, spent her second day in a high-level isolation room at the Royal Free hospital in Hampstead, north London, where she is being treated with an experimental anti-viral drug and blood plasma from the Ebola survivor Will Pooley.

A spokeswoman for the hospital said there was no update on her condition, which on Wednesday was described by her doctor, Michael Jacobs, as “as well as we could hope for”. She was sitting up in an isolation tent, and able to read, eat and talk to her parents through an intercom.

The death rate for people who contract Ebola is around 50% and doctors have said the next few days will be critical for Cafferkey’s survival.

The World Health Organisation said on Thursday that 317 more people had died of the killer virus since Christmas Eve, bringing to 7,905 the death toll from the current outbreak, which has been mostly confined to west Africa. Ernest Bai Koroma, president of Sierra Leone, the worst-hit nation, used a New Year’s Day address to call for a week of fasting and prayer to help end the outbreak and urged people to refrain from touching the sick or corpses.

Prof Paul Cosford, director for health protection and medical director at Public Health England, said transmission of the disease on Cafferkey’s flight was “extremely unlikely”.

He said: “For Ebola to be transmitted from one person to another, contact with blood or other body fluids is needed. The individual involved did not experience any symptoms consistent with the transmission of Ebola.”

Cafferkey had been working at the Kerry Town treatment centre, a UK-government-backed facility built last autumn in a forest clearing an hour outside Freetown. It is staffed by locals, NHS workers and Cuban medics. Save the Children, which has run the centre since it opened on 5 November, has launched an investigation into how Cafferkey contracted the killer virus and whether she was exposed outside the treatment centre compound.

Michael von Bertele, the charity’s humanitarian director, said: “It’s really important for us to try and understand whether it was a failure of training, of protection, of procedure, or indeed whether she contracted it in some incidental contact within the community, because our workers don’t just work inside the red zone, which is a very high-risk area, they do also have contact – although we are very, very careful in briefing people to avoid personal contact – outside of the treatment centre.”

Public Health England has said it is also contacting 100 passengers and the crew on the second leg of Cafferkey’s journey to Scotland, from Casablanca to Heathrow on Royal Air Maroc flight AT0800. An additional 32 international passengers are being contacted by international public health authorities, it said.

In a statement the agency said: “As a precaution we inform people sitting directly in the vicinity of the passenger (two rows adjacent, ahead and behind, comprising 21 passengers) to take their temperature twice daily until 18 January 2015 [the estimated 21-day incubation period for Ebola]. If their temperature is 37.5°C or higher, or they begin to feel unwell in any way, they are advised to call a dedicated Public Health England contact immediately for advice. Other passengers and crew on board will be advised to call NHS 111 with their flight details if they begin to feel unwell.”

This article originally appeared on guardian.co.uk

 

This article was written by Robert Booth from The Guardian and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.