Doctors for a British nurse who is being treated for Ebola in a London Hospital said Saturday that she is now in critical condition. The announcement came as a surprise, as initial reports suggested that she was already stable.
"Sorry to announce that the condition of Pauline Cafferkey has gradually deteriorated over the past two days," the doctors said, according to the New York Times.
Cafferkey got infected with Ebola after volunteering with the charity Save the Children in Sierra Leone. She started getting ill and had a high fever when she was flown back to Scotland last week. Doctors confirmed on Monday that she contracted the virus and was immediately transferred to an isolation unit at the Royal Free Hospital in London, according to the New York Times.
A spokeswoman for Public Health England said that the officials have spoken with the 71 passengers and crew aboard the British Airways flight from London's Heathrow Airport to Glasgow and 101 passengers aboard the Royal Air Maroc flight from Casablanca to Heathrow that Cafferkey was on. Health authorities are still looking for 31 international passengers, BBC News reported.
Cafferkey is being treated with an experimental antiviral drug and blood from Ebola survivors. Doctors admitted that it was "very difficult" to tell how the patients will react to the treatment because it was tested only on a small group of people.
"A proportion of people don't get severely ill; Will Pooley was an example - he was never very sick and he recovered fully within a few days," David Mabey, an expert in communicable diseases from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told BBC News.
"The critical period is in the first four or five days after it's diagnosed, because, you know, if you are going to get worse then that's when it happens, and I'm very sorry to hear that seems to have been the case."
Pooley was the first British national diagnosed with the Ebola virus and was treated using the experimental drug ZMapp. He is now fully recovered.
The World Health Organization (WHO) said the number of people infected with Ebola in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea has exceeded 20,000 and has killed more than 7,800.
