The first Frenchwoman affected by the Ebola virus is a volunteer from the NGO Doctors Without Borders. We won’t know any more. MSF wishes to preserve the privacy of this woman and those around her.
The only detail we have, she worked in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, “in direct contact with patients”, specifies the Parisian. She obviously complied with the safety instructions to protect herself, and wore a combination, a mask and gloves. “This drastically reduces the risk of infection. However, this risk is part of this type of intervention, and our teams are not completely spared,” MSF said in a press release.
As soon as the first symptoms appeared, the volunteer was placed in isolation. And the laboratory tests having confirmed the infection, the decision was taken to transfer her to a specialized treatment center in France. In other words, one of the 9 French hospitals equipped to receive Ebola patients.
Here again, all precautions are taken to minimize the risk of transmission of the virus. The MSF volunteer will therefore be transferred to a medical plane. And the Ministers of Health and Foreign Affairs have already published a press release on Tuesday evening to reassure the population: “The conditions of transport and hospitalization will strictly respect all international recommendations to avoid any contamination of a third person”. For Dr Noël Tordo, director of the Antiviral Strategies Unit at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, interviewed in the columns of Le Parisien, “the risk of spread is very, very low. The patient will not be in contact with other people except the nursing staff, who are perfectly equipped”.
Liberia, where the MSF volunteer was on assignment, is the country where the epidemic is most devastating. Some 660 new cases are identified each week. And health professionals obviously pay a heavy price. At the start of the epidemic, 10% of deaths were to be deplored in the ranks of doctors and nurses. But, of course, it is the local professionals who are the most affected. At the beginning of September, nurses from the largest hospital in Liberia went on strike: they demanded gloves, masks, boots… Necessary protection, but not sufficient.
