First Ebola patient in UK named

LONDON: Scottish nurse Pauline Cafferkey has been named as the first patient to be diagnosed with Ebola in the UK after returning from volunteering in Sierra Leone.

Cafferkey, 39, had written movingly on treating Ebola patients in an online diary published shortly before she was diagnosed with the disease, according to a report.

Cafferkey is being treated at the Royal Free Hospital in north London, having been transferred on a military-style plane from her local hospital in Glasgow.

A doctor who worked with her in Sierra Leone criticised the 'shambolic' testing process at Heathrow airport.

Cafferkey was able to pass through Heathrow, board a flight with other passengers to Glasgow and return home before she began to feel ill.

Dr Martin Deahl, from Newport, Shrops, who was on the Heathrow flight with her, said: "The precautions and checks at the airport were shambolic. They ran out of testing kits and didn't seem to know what they were doing."

Deahl said he suspected Cafferkey contracted the disease at a Christmas service.

She was volunteering with Save the Children to help with the Ebola crisis having flown out with a team of 30 NHS medical staff who had volunteered for the assignment.

Health officials are asking anybody who may have had contact with Miss Cafferkey since her return to the UK to contact them on a specially set up telephone hotline, inlcuding passenegers on a flight from Heathrow to Glasgow.

"The area where the Ebola patients are is classed as the infective Red Zone, and the area surrounding it, the safe Green Zone. Bizarrely we find ourselves saying 'good luck' to our colleagues prior to entering the Red Zone, a sobering reminder of what we are doing," she wrote in her diary.

By her final week, Cafferkey was looking forward to Christmas but aware that Sierra Leone had banned celebrations to try to slow down the Ebola outbreak.