Sept. 4, 2014 -- A plane carrying Rick Sacra, MD, the third American health worker infected with Ebola, left Liberia on Thursday, his wife said at a news conference.
“I just had a call from the doctor who put Rick on a plane to come to the United States. And he said Rick is clearly sick but that he was in good spirits, and he walked onto the plane. So we are really encouraged by that,” Deborah Sacra told reporters, her voice breaking briefly as she held back tears.
He’ll be treated in the biocontainment unit at Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, according to SIM USA, the missionary organization he worked for. He is expected to arrive there Friday morning. The isolation unit is one of four such units in the U.S. that are specially equipped to handle highly infectious patients.
The 51-year-old doctor had returned to Liberia about a month ago to reopen ELWA hospital, his brother said in an interview with WebMD on Thursday.
“People were dying left and right of malaria and for lack of emergency C-sections, things that were highly fixable, but just there weren’t any regular doctors doing regular work in hospitals,” said Doug Sacra, recalling what his brother told him.
Reopening the hospital was difficult, he said. “All the hospitals had to be fully cleaned from top to bottom, and they had to get staff to come back to work, which was very hard.
“A lot of people said, ‘If I go back to work (in West Africa), my husband won’t let me come home because he thinks I’ll bring home Ebola.’ So there had to be a lot of cajoling and convincing to get local staff back,” Doug Sacra added.
Debbie Sacra echoed those sentiments. She said her husband knew the dangers inherent in the work, but that he could not abandon the people he’d worked with for most of his life in their greatest time of need.
“He was so concerned with the children who were going to die from malaria without hospitalization and the women who had no place to go to deliver their baby by cesarean section. He’s not someone who can stand back when there’s a need to take care of,” she said.
Sacra told his wife he thought he might have been infected by a patient with HIV who had also contracted Ebola, according to Doug Sacra.
One of the ways ELWA hospital tests patients for Ebola is by checking their temperature before they’re admitted. If they’re not running a fever, they’re treated as being free of the disease, he explained.
A fever is one of the first symptoms of Ebola infection. It’s the body’s way of beginning to mount a defense against the virus.
source : Third American With Ebola Evacuated to Nebraska
