MADRID/LONDON: A Spanish nurse who is the first person to contract Ebola outside of Africa may have touched her face with the gloves of her protective suit while caring for a priest who died of the disease, a doctor treating her said yesterday.
The nurse, Teresa Romero, was being treated for the deadly infection at a Madrid hospital while Spanish officials launched an investigation into how she was able to contract Ebola despite strict protocols for handling contagious patients.
The virus, which has killed more than 3,400 people in West Africa since March in the largest outbreak of the disease on record, causes haemorrhagic fever and is spread through direct contact with body fluids from an infected person.
While Romero is the only confirmed Ebola case in Spain aside from two priests who contracted the disease in Africa and died, more than 50 other people who may have had contact with the virus in the country are currently being monitored, including primary health care and hospital staff, European officials said.
“She has talked to me about the gloves, she touched her face with the gloves. That’s what she remembers and what she has told me three times,” German Ramirez, one of the doctors at Carlos III hospital where the nurse is being treated, told reporters.
The nurse took leave from work immediately after Spanish missionary Manuel Garcia died on September 25. Wearing a full protective suit, she had entered the priest’s room once while he was alive and once after his death to clean the room.
“I believe the error was made when taking off the suit,” she told Spain’s El Pais newspaper in a telephone interview published yesterday. “I see that as the most critical moment, when something could have happened. But I’m not sure.”
Health worker union officials said Romero alerted hospital staff three times to say she had a fever and a rash, but because her temperature had not gone above 38.6 degrees Celsius the hospital did not see her as a risk.
Reuters
