As a doctor fights Ebola, a nurse beats the deadly virus
The dangers confronting health care workers who treat Ebola patients took center stage Friday in the nation’s capital and in America’s largest city.
While doctors in New York City closely monitored the condition of Dr. Craig Spencer, the nation’s newest Ebola patient, others in Bethesda, Md., marveled at the rapid recovery of Nina Pham, a Dallas nurse who contracted the deadly virus only weeks earlier.
Pham is the sixth U.S. patient in the current epidemic to fully recover from the virus after treatment in one of the four specialized bio-containment facilities in the United States.
Spencer, 33, became infected while treating patients in Ebola-stricken Guinea, in West Africa, as a volunteer with the humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders. He’s currently in stable condition at Bellevue Hospital Center as health officials try to retrace his travels and find people who he may have infected while he was contagious. The governors of New York and New Jersey announced a mandatory quarantine for all health care workers returning from West Africa who had direct contact with Ebola patients.
Spencer is helping investigators reconstruct his movements over the past few days. Teams of detectives with the New York City health department are retracing his travels since Tuesday, when the doctor first started feeling sluggish.
Pham, a nurse at Texas Presbyterian Hospital Dallas, became infected on her job while caring for a Liberian Ebola patient, Thomas Eric Duncan. She was one of more than 70 health care workers at the beleaguered Dallas hospital who were monitored for possible infection after they helped treat Duncan, who later died.
On Friday, Pham, 26, looked healthy, happy and emotional as she faced a throng of journalists who cheered her release from the clinical center at the National Institutes of Health in suburban Washington, where a medical team helped her beat the same Ebola virus that’s killing 70 percent of people who become infected in West Africa.
With her mother, Diana, and sister, Catherine, in attendance, Pham thanked her care team, her public supporters and former Ebola patient Dr. Kent Brantly, for his “selfless act” of donating his plasma.
Because he recovered from Ebola, Brantly’s plasma may have developed antibodies against the virus, which may have helped Pham “jump-start” her own immune response, said Jennifer Kanakry, assistant professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
Pham didn’t receive any experimental medications during her eight-day stay at NIH, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Aside from Pham being young and very healthy and receiving intensive care immediately in Dallas after becoming infected, Fauci said it’s impossible to say what made the difference in Pham’s improvement.
Pham’s colleague at the Dallas hospital, nurse Amber Vinson, 29, also contracted Ebola after treating Duncan. Vinson is hospitalized at the bio-containment unit at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta. Earlier this week, Vinson’s family released a statement saying she, too, was free of the virus. On Friday the hospital and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a statement saying Vinson was making good progress in her treatment.
This story was originally published October 24, 2014 at 9:01 PM with the headline "As a doctor fights Ebola, a nurse beats the deadly virus."