A nurse who recovered after contracting ebola was critically ill last night after an unprecedented relapse that experts described as “staggering”.
Pauline Cafferkey was flown to the Royal Free Hospital, London, in the early hours on Friday after becoming ill in Glasgow. Doctors discovered the virus had managed to survive in her body.
Her sister has criticised an out-of-hours GP service that Ms Cafferkey, 39, used on Monday evening last week, for sending her home without diagnosing a relapse. However, experts said the complication was so rare that it was impossible to tell whether earlier intervention might have helped.
Nathalie MacDermott, clinical research fellow at Imperial College London, said: “She will be receiving the best available care at the Royal Free Hospital but this is an unprecedented situation in medical terms.
“It is unlikely that anything could have been done to prevent this relapse. This is an unexpected situation which could not have been anticipated.
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“It is difficult to know whether any earlier intervention may have altered her current condition, as we are only just learning about the potential longterm effects of ebola virus disease and management of complications.
“Similarly, there is still no proven effective treatment for ebola virus disease that would be known to prevent or manage secondary recurrence.”
Jonathan Ball, professor of molecular virology at the University of Nottingham, said that her deterioration was “frankly staggering”. He added: “I am not aware from the scientific literature of a case where ebola has been associated with what we can only assume are life-threatening complications after someone has initially recovered, and certainly not so many months after.”
Ms Cafferkey worked in Sierra Leone as a volunteer before returning to Britain on December 28 last year. She caught the virus while wearing a large plastic visor to protect her face as she treated patients, which Médecins Sans Frontières says does not provide enough protection, unlike a mask and hood. Her illness was diagnosed after she returned to Glasgow via Heathrow.
When Ms Cafferkey was previously treated for ebola at the Royal Free Hospital her condition also deteriorated to “critical” but she made a full recovery.
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Although public health officials have tracked down people with whom Ms Cafferkey has been in close contact recently, the risk of her infecting anyone else is thought to be extremely low.
Professor Ball said: “Whilst we don’t know her specific symptoms, we have been reassured that before she was admitted to the Royal Free she wasn’t exhibiting any that we’d associate with a transmission risk to others, so contact monitoring and vaccination is a precautionary measure.”
Ebola is one of the world’s deadliest diseases, with more than 50 per cent of cases resulting in death. The symptoms are severe, with patients experiencing a sudden onset of fever, as well as weakness and muscle pain accompanied by headaches, vomiting, diarrhoea, rashes and kidney and liver problems.
Separately, it emerged in a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine last night that male ebola survivors can pass on the disease via sexual intercourse years after their recovery.