British Ebola nurse recovers again, leaves specialist hospital unit

[November 12, 2015]  LONDON (Reuters) - A Scottish nurse who contracted and recovered from Ebola, but then suffered life-threatening complications from the virus persisting in her brain, has recovered enough to be transferred to a hospital near her home, doctors said on Thursday.

Medics at a specialist unit at the Royal Free Hospital in London, where Pauline Cafferkey was readmitted in October, said she was no longer infectious and had been discharged from there and admitted to a hospital in Glasgow, Scotland.

"Her condition is stable," the London hospital said in a statement.

Cafferkey, 39, contracted Ebola in December 2014 when she was working in a treatment facility in Sierra Leone at the height of an epidemic of the disease which swept through three countries in West Africa.

Cafferkey initially recovered from the Ebola hemorrhagic fever and was sent home in January.

But in October she fell ill again and doctors found the virus was persisting in tissues in her brain. They later said she had developed meningitis cause by the Ebola virus - the first known such case.

Doctors said in October that Cafferkey was being treated with an experimental antiviral drug known as GS5734 being developed by the U.S. drugmaker Gilead Sciences. They gave no update on Thursday about whether they thought the drug had made a difference.

Latest data from the World Health Organization on the West Africa Ebola outbreak show the virus has killed some 11,300 of the more than 28,500 people it has infected since December 2013. Sierra Leone was declared free of Ebola on November 7.

(Reporting by Kate Kelland; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

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