MOSCOW, August 21 (RIA Novosti) – Dr. Kent Brantly, a US doctor who contracted the Ebola virus while working in Liberia, will be released from an Atlanta hospital Thursday, officials told ABC News.
Brantly contracted the disease while working in a Liberian Ebola ward with the Christian aid agency Samaritan’s Purse. He and another American aid worker who got ill with Ebola in Liberia, Nancy Writebol, were the first humans to receive the experimental drug ZMapp. After being treated with the serum, they were transferred to an isolation ward at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia, near the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in early August.
According to Samaritan’s Purse, Brantly’s condition started to improve dramatically within an hour after being treated with ZMapp, ABC News reported Wednesday. The drug, developed by San Diego-based biotech company Mapp Biopharmaceutical, has already shown promise in trials involving monkeys.
The number of deaths from the Ebola virus disease in the West African countries of Liberia, Nigeria, Guinea and Sierra Leone spiked to 1350, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported Wednesday.
Ebola hemorrhagic fever is a deadly disease transmitted through direct contact with the blood or bodily fluids of the infected. There is no licensed treatment or vaccine for the Ebola virus, which has a case fatality rate of up to 90 percent.
Last week, the WHO concluded that it is ethical to use experimental drugs to treat patients infected with the Ebola virus.
