Glasgow: Ebola has caused panic in Europe again and the first case in months diagnosed in Glasgow, Scotland’s largest city, as a healthcare worker recently back from Sierra Leone was diagnosed on Monday.
This is the first diagnosis of the deadly virus in Britain in recent days since a woman was
The woman who had been working in Sierra Leone, was being treated Monday in a Glasgow hospital amid tight security.
She has been only identified as a health care worker for National Health Service.
Official government reports say she arrived in Glasgow on Sunday night via Casablanca, Morocco, and Heathrow Airport in London. The panic continued after NHS doctors attempted tracing all her previous contacts since landing in the UK with conclusions stating that she had had contact with only one person in Glasgow. The UK’s Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said the woman would be transferred soon to a specialist unit in London.
Britain’s only previous case in the current outbreak was William Pooley, a nurse who also contracted the disease in Sierra Leone. He survived. But Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has labelled it the first case of Ebola ever diagnosed inside the United Kingdom. Sturgeon said the risk to the public is “extremely low to the point of negligible” and that steps would be taken to protect the public.
“Scotland has been preparing for this possibility from the beginning of the outbreak in west Africa, and I am confident that we are well prepared,” she said, saying also that the patient is “stable” and would soon be transferred to an isolation unit at the Royal Free Hospital in London.
She said the patient had traveled on an internal British Airways flight from London to Glasgow on Sunday night and that the other 71 passengers and staff on that flight will be contacted.
But she said the patient was not yet showing symptoms at the time and that people in that stage are much less contagious than they are after they exhibit symptoms, which include a high fever, diarrhea and vomiting.
The development came as more than 45 new cases emerged in Liberia.