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 "I will finish what I started. I am returning to Sierra Leone,"
Felix Baez, 43, told reporters at Havana's Jose Marti airport
shortly after landing, the official website Cubadebate reported.
It was not immediately clear if Cuban health officials would allow
Baez to go back to Africa.
Cuba has won international praise for its contribution to fight the
worst outbreak of Ebola on record, which has killed more than 6,000
people. Some 200 doctors and nurses are on standby for an Ebola
assignment in West Africa, in addition to the 256 already sent to
Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea.
Health Minister Roberto Morales and other ministry officials were at
the airport to greet Baez, who wore a blue T-shirt emblazoned with
the logo of Geneva University Hospitals, where he spent 16 days
being treated in isolation.
Baez was quickly reunited with his wife and eldest son, who is
studying medicine.
"There was celebration and happiness, hugs and kisses," said Jorge
Perez, the director of Havana's leading tropical diseases hospital,
who traveled with Baez from Geneva.
Soon after arriving in Geneva on Nov. 20, Baez received the Canadian
experimental treatment ZMab, a precursor to the Ebola drug ZMapp,
which has been used to treat U.S. patients.
"Two days afterwards he was already much better," Geneva's chief
medical officer, Jacques-André Romand, told Reuters, adding that the
same drug had been sent to Rome to treat an Italian doctor battling
the virus.
Romand added that at no time during Baez's treatment was there any
risk of transmission to the local population.
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A hospital spokeswoman said Baez received both ZMab and the untested
flu drug favipiravir, made by Japan's Fujifilm, which the World
Health Organization (WHO) has included on a list of potential Ebola
treatments.
Out of 138 healthcare workers who have caught the disease in Sierra
Leone, 106 have died, a much higher fatality rate than among health
workers in neighboring Guinea and Liberia, WHO data published on
Wednesday showed.
Two more doctors died in Sierra Leone on Friday, a government and
hospital source said.
(Reporting by Daniel Trotta in Havana and Stephanie Nebehay and Tom
Miles in Geneva; Editing by Jonathan Oatis and Paul Simao)
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