Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, would not identify the patient to protect his privacy. “His condition is unfortunately serious, but this is a serious disease, and hopefully over the next days we can turn him around,” Dr. Fauci said by telephone, after having just left the patient’s room.
“We’re going to do everything in our power to try to get him well,” he said. “We have a responsibility when an American gets infected to take care of them and bring them back to their homeland, and that’s what we did here.”
Several health workers in Sierra Leone said the American had felt dizzy and collapsed while working at a hospital in the Port Loko district. He tested positive for Ebola on March 10.
Colleagues helped him up, and they are now considered contacts who may be infected. None have tested positive for Ebola. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Friday that plans were being made to bring several Americans who may have been exposed to him to the United States for monitoring and isolation.
“It’s hard for me to understand what else you can do if one of your colleagues or patients collapses,” said Dr. Paul Farmer, a Harvard professor of medicine who is a co-founder of Partners in Health. “You take care of people as with every other illness that’s communicable, and you’re exposed. I would be deeply disappointed if those are exposures that result in another case.”
Whether the man was infected in the group’s Ebola treatment unit, where he was training in the high-risk zone, or in the government hospital, where Partners in Health supports the resumption of health care services, was unknown. Ebola was diagnosed on Friday in a Sierra Leonean working at the same hospital, but officials said the cases appeared unrelated."
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