Following a successful diagnosis of her Ebola status, Pauline Cafferkey, who just returned from Sierra Leone to Glasgow via Casablanca and London Heathrow, has been transferred to the Royal Free Hospital’s isolation unit for better treatment.
An associate public health nurse at Blantyre Health Centre in South Lanarkshire, Ms Cafferkey had been placed under observation at the Gartnavel Hospital in Glasgow, Scotland, where her condition had been stabilized before she was finally moved around past 03:00 GMT on Tuesday.
Flown from Glasgow Airport to RAF Northolt in north-west London aboard an air force Hercules plane, Ms Cafferkey was then moved to the Royal Free Hospital in hampstead, north London. Cafferkey worked with the Save the Children program in Sierra Leone, where she was a member of about 50 NHS healthcare workers working as volunteers in Sierra Leone. The group had returned home aboard a British Airways flight during the weekend.
Ms Cafferkey had not developed feverish conditions while still airborne, and she had been screened on touching down in the UK and her temperature perfectly normal – hence her progress to Glasgow. But she started displaying symptoms soon after, and she was taken in at the Gartnavel Hospital in Scotland.
The authorities in Scotland have commenced a search for the 70 passengers aboard the connecting flight from London to Glasgow, and while 63 of them have been traced and identified, the remaining 7 are proving difficult to reach. The Health Protection Scotland has made contact with the identified passengers who might have had contact with Cafferkey aboard the plane, and they have also left messages for them.
According to Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, Cafferkey is responding to treatments and “doing as well as can be expected in the circumstances.” Also chairing a meeting of the Scottish Government Resilience Committee, Ms Sturgeon states that the passage of Cafferkey through public transport to Scotland does not necessarily make her a health risk to the public, and the risk of exposure to the public was “extremely low to the point of negligible.” And a spokesman for the prime minister adds that “Robust and well-practised procedures were followed and the risk to the general public remains very low.”
Over 7,800 people have died from Ebola in the West African countries of Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea according to the World Health Organization, and over 20,000 people have been infected with the plague since it broke out early 2014.