Spanish nurse cleared of Ebola
MADRID: A Spanish nurse who was the first person to catch Ebola outside of Africa no longer has the virus, according to medical test results Sunday, the government said.
Teresa Romero, who was hospitalised on Oct 6 at the Carlos III Hospital in Madrid, has tested negative for the deadly virus, the special committee responsible for monitoring the virus in Spain said in a statement.
She will be given another test to confirm the results "in the coming hours", said the statement, adding that her "health was... developing favourably".
"I am very happy today because we can say Teresa beat the disease," her husband, Javier Limon, said in a video filmed in the hospital room where he is being kept under observation.
He and another 14 people who had contact with Romero before she was diagnosed with Ebola are still being kept under observation at the Carlos III hospital. The statement said none of them have yet shown symptoms.
"We both started to cry, to laugh" after hearing the news, Romero's friend Teresa Mesa told media gathered outside the hospital after speaking to the nurse by phone.
"She really wants to leave... She is already up and eating almost everything," she added.
Romero is the first person known to have become infected with the haemorrhagic fever outside Africa, where it has killed more than 4,500 people.
The 44-year-old nurse caught the deadly virus, which is passed by contact with the bodily fluids of those infected, after caring for two Spanish missionaries who were repatriated from west Africa. The two men later died.
Mesa said Romero told her she fought for her life after catching Ebola, which begins with fever and can then escalate to diarrhoea, vomiting, internal bleeding and organ failure.
The hospital must now wait 21 days -- the virus's incubation period -- to be sure that the 50 or so people who cared for Romero were not infected during her time in the hospital.
Second tests of two other suspected cases, one who had contact with the nurse and a traveller from Nigeria who developed a fever on an Air France flight from Paris to Madrid, were both negative, the committee statement said. – AFP