Britain reviews screening after Ebola nurse slipped through Heathrow

LONDON: Screening protocols are being reviewed at London's Heathrow Airport after a nurse returning to Britain from West Africa - and who suspected she had Ebola - was allowed to board a domestic flight, officials said Wednesday.
Pauline Cafferkey is now in a specialist isolation ward at London's Royal Free Hospital.
"She's sitting up and talking," her doctors said in a statement.
"She's had the treatment, it's gone very smoothly, no side effects at all."
She has been given plasma from the blood of a recovered patient and also an experimental anti-viral drug.
The World Health Organisation said Wednesday the death toll from the Ebola outbreak that has ravaged West Africa for more than a year rose to at least 7,905.
More than 20,200 infections have been recorded, world health authorities said.
The majority of cases have been recorded in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, where more than 7,890 people have died, the WHO said.
The organisation believes the true death toll is higher, but that many cases have gone unrecorded.
The Scottish nurse arrived on a flight from Sierra Leone on Sunday night and had her temperature taken seven times before being allowed to board a flight for Glasgow.
She reported she was sick early Monday and was admitted to hospital in Glasgow.
Dame Sally Davis, the government's chief medical officer, said a review was underway, but that Cafferkey, despite saying she felt unwell, had no symptoms and her temperature was normal.
"She wouldn't be transmitting the virus therefore she was cleared as fit to fly," Davis said.
Cafferkey, 39, is being treated in the ward where William Pooley, 29, a British nurse who has now returned to work in Sierra Leone, was successfully treated for the Ebola virus in September.
Pooley was diagnosed with Ebola in Sierra Leone and evacuated to Britain on a military plane.
The plasma being transfused to Cafferkey is believed to be from Pooley.
Doctors believe what they call convalescent plasma has antibodies that could help her fight the infection by locking onto infected cells and neutralizing them. – dpa