Three new health workers have been quarantined in a Madrid hospital, including two doctors that had treated the nurse recently found to have been infected with ebola.
One of the doctors now in isolation, Dr Juan Manuel Parra, treated nurse Teresa Romero for 16 hours at Madrid’s Alcorcón hospital on Monday. He had direct exposure to her bodily fluids during this period and both he and Romero only discovered that she had been diagnosed with ebola via media reports. The doctor volunteered to be admitted to hospital for observation and to avoid further spreading the disease.
Romero became the first person to contract ebola outside of the current “hot zone” in West Africa after treating the two infected missionaries. It is currently unclear how she became infected with the deadly disease. However, Spanish media reports that it is possible that she came in contact with some infected bodily fluids while removing her protective suit after cleaning the room of one of the missionaries after they died.
Seven people are now quarantined and under observation in the Carlos III hospital, the hospital where two Spanish missionaries died after contracting the disease in West Africa. This includes Romero and her husband, two other nurses, and the three new patients.
Romero is currently the only patient to present symptoms of the deadly virus, but ebola has an incubation period of up to 21 days and so they are keeping the other patients in quarantine as a precaution.
