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 Dr. Rick Sacra, 51, who was working as a medical missionary at a
hospital in Liberia when he contracted Ebola, has been reported to
have made progress for several days since his arrival at the Omaha
hospital on Friday.
Sacra is being cared for in a special isolation unit designed to
treat patients with highly infectious diseases and has been
communicating with family through a video link.
"Dr. Sacra's lab values continue to move in the right direction and
doctors treating him in the Biocontainment Unit at The Nebraska
Medical Center are pleased with the way things are trending," the
hospital said in a statement.
Sacra's wife, Debbie Sacra, is expected to speak to reporters
Thursday afternoon along with doctors caring for him. Sacra, who is
from Massachusetts, was working in West Africa on behalf of the
North Carolina-based Christian group SIM USA.
The virus kills about half of those who contract it. The outbreak
has killed at least 2,296 people out of 4,293 cases in five West
African countries, the World Health Organization said on Tuesday.
Sacra is one of four Ebola patients transported to the United States
for treatment. Doctors have said they are using an unidentified
experimental research drug to treat him.
Three patients have been treated for Ebola at Emory University
Hospital in Atlanta, which has an isolation unit like one at the
Omaha hospital.
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An American doctor was admitted to Emory on Tuesday after being
infected with Ebola in Sierra Leone. That doctor has not been
identified and the hospital said on Wednesday it had no update on
his condition.
The two other patients that had been at Emory, U.S. missionaries
Nancy Writebol and Dr. Kent Brantly, recovered and were released in
August.
An experimental drug, ZMapp, was given to Writebol and Brantly. No
more doses of ZMapp are available, and doctors have said it is not
clear whether it helped their recovery.
(Reporting by David Bailey in Minneapolis and Colleen Jenkins in
Winston-Salem, North Carolina)
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