A British doctor who tested positive for Ebola while helping to tackle the outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has been flown back to the United Kingdom and is being treated in a specialist isolation unit in London, the UK government has confirmed.
The patient, whose identity has not been made public, arrived on Thursday aboard a medical evacuation flight that landed at RAF Northolt, a military airbase in west London, before being transferred by road to the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead, north London.
The doctor is being cared for in the hospital's high-level isolation unit, one of only two such facilities in England designed for patients with highly infectious diseases. The unit is staffed by a dedicated team of doctors, nurses, therapists and laboratory staff trained to treat viral haemorrhagic fevers, and it successfully treated three health workers evacuated from the West African Ebola outbreak in 2014 and 2015.
The transfer was carried out under a carefully planned escort designed to keep the journey fully contained. Three large police vans, two ambulances and another support car accompanied the patient from the airbase to the hospital, with traffic stopped and officers keeping members of the public away as the convoy arrived.
The evacuation flight was organised jointly by the British and Congolese governments together with their international health partners, after the doctor tested positive while working on the outbreak response in DR Congo. The doctor had been deployed there by a humanitarian organisation to help tackle the epidemic, which the country's health ministry declared on 15 May.
Health officials in Britain have stressed that the risk to the wider public remains low. Dr Renu Bindra, deputy director for all-hazards public health response at the UK Health Security Agency, 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." Contacts of the patient in the UK will be monitored for 21 days, the maximum incubation period for Ebola.
The case is the first confirmed infection of a British national during the current outbreak, and the patient will be just the fifth Ebola case ever recorded in the UK. The three previous patients all caught the disease during the outbreak in West Africa in 2014 and 2015, and all were treated at the Royal Free.
The outbreak the doctor was helping to fight is now one of the largest ever recorded. Since it was declared in May, it has passed 10,000 confirmed cases and more than 5,000 deaths, according to figures reported by health authorities, making it the largest and deadliest outbreak in DR Congo's history and the second deadliest on record, behind only the West African epidemic of 2014 to 2016.
The current outbreak involves the Bundibugyo strain of the virus, one of the less common types of Ebola and one for which there is no licensed vaccine, which has made containment harder for health workers on the ground. Ebola is a severe viral illness that causes fever, severe headache, muscle pain, vomiting and, in many cases, internal and external bleeding; with more than 5,000 deaths among more than 10,000 confirmed cases, the toll in DR Congo underlines how lethal the virus can be, and there is no known cure, so treatment focuses on supportive care in isolation.
The patient will remain in the Royal Free's isolation unit while treatment continues, and the hospital has said it will not comment on the patient's condition or identity, asking for privacy for the family. In DR Congo, meanwhile, the response continues against an outbreak that is still growing, with health workers facing the added difficulty of a strain for which no vaccine exists and a death toll that has already made it the country's worst Ebola epidemic.
