Will Pooley, the first British person to contract the deadly Ebola virus, said he feels lucky to have received such good care after being discharged from hospital in London.
The 29-year-old volunteer nurse had been receiving treatment at the Royal Free hospital in Hampstead, London, since being flown back to Britain from Sierra Leone on an RAF plane 10 days ago. Pooley, from Eyke in Suffolk, contracted the virus after five weeks volunteering at a clinic in Kenema, where he was helping to treat patients with Ebola.
At a press conference on Wednesday at the Royal Free, where he was treated in an isolation unit, he spoke of how fortunate he felt compared to those he had cared for in Sierra Leone.
Pooley said: “I was really lucky in several ways. First, I received care which is a world apart from what people are receiving in west Africa at the moment, despite a lot of organisations’ best efforts. I had amazing care, which is one difference. The other difference to a lot of Ebola cases [was] that my symptoms never progressed to the worst stages of the disease. The people I’ve seen dying, really horrible deaths really … I had some unpleasant symptoms but nothing compared to some of the worst of the disease, especially when people end up dying.” Read more
