For the second time, a Scottish nurse who contracted Ebola 14 months ago has been hospitalized for a “late complication” from the original infection.
Pauline Cafferkey has been admitted to London’s Royal Free Hospital “due to a late complication from her previous infection by the Ebola virus,” the hospital said Tuesday.
The hospital did not specify when she was admitted. But the nurse “will be treated by the hospital’s infectious diseases team under nationally agreed guidelines,” it said.
The hospital also did not say what the complication was.
Cafferkey was previously readmitted to the hospital in October for what UK health officials called a “late complication.” Dr. Michael Jacobs, a specialist in infectious diseases at that London hospital, later clarified that Cafferkey’s complication was meningitis, not a relapse of Ebola.
“This is the original Ebola virus that she had many months ago which has been inside the brain, replicating at a very low level probably, and which has now re-emerged to cause this clinical illness of meningitis,” Jacobs said last year about the October complication.
Cafferkey recovered from the meningitis and was released in December.
2014 Ebola infection
Cafferkey contracted Ebola while working in Sierra Leone in December 2014.
She didn’t learn that her own life was at risk until she fell ill shortly after returning to the UK later that month. Cafferkey was diagnosed with Ebola and was moved for intensive treatment to the Royal Free Hospital, which has an isolation unit with a tent with controlled ventilation set up over the patient’s bed.
At one point during that initial stay, the London hospital said that Cafferkey’s condition had “gradually deteriorated over … two days” and that she was then in critical condition.
She managed to rebound, and weeks later she went home.
More than 10,000 people have died from the Ebola outbreak in West Africa since 2014.
Last July, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that a newly developed vaccine was “highly effective” and could help prevent the spread of Ebola.
As reported by CNN