The Scottish nurse who contracted the Ebola virus in west Africa will be treated with an experimental anti-viral drug and blood plasma from a survivor of the disease, her doctor said.

Dr Michael Jacobs, who leads the team treating Pauline Cafferkey at the Royal Free hospital in London, said she was “as well as we could hope for” and was sitting up in an isolation tent and able to eat, read and talk.

Her family have been able to visit her since she was admitted to the hospital on Tuesday morning after becoming the first person diagnosed with Ebola on UK soil.

The update on Cafferkey’s condition came as health chiefs vowed to review screening measures after it emerged that she had raised concerns about her health to Heathrow officials upon returning from Sierra Leone on Sunday night. She was cleared to fly after passing several temperature tests but was diagnosed with Ebola the following day at Gartnavel hospital in Glasgow.

The 39-year-old nurse from Blantyre, South Lanarkshire, contracted the virus while carrying out a five-week volunteer placement at a treatment centre in Kerry Town, Sierra Leone, for Save the Children.

Dr Michael Jacobs, the head of the team treating Pauline Cafferkey for Ebola at the Royal Free hospital. Photograph: Hannah Mckay/EPA

In a press conference, Jacobs said Cafferkey was able to have “natural, general conversation about things that are happening” and was talking to her parents via an internal communication system.

He said: “I’m sure this isn’t how she intended to spend New Year’s Eve. Imagine what she’s been through having had a journey back from where she’s been working very, very hard as part of a team in Sierra Leone.

“She’s had a long journey back, finally making it home, then becoming unwell, then being taken away from her home again. It’s been a very unsettled time for her, which she’s coping with remarkably.”

Jacobs said her treatment so far had “gone very smoothly, no side-effects at all” and that they would know in a week whether she was recovering.

He declined to name the anti-viral drug that will be used to treat Cafferkey, but said it was incredibly safe despite being “not proven to work”.

“At the moment, we don’t know what the best treatment strategies are. That’s why we’re calling them experimental treatments,” he said.

“As we’ve explained to Pauline, we can’t be as confident as we would like. There’s obviously very good reason to believe it’s going to help her, otherwise we wouldn’t be using it at all, but we simply don’t have enough information to know that’s the case.”

Jacobs also declined to confirm whether she would receive the convalescent plasma from British Ebola survivor William Pooley, who was cured of the virus by a nursing team led by Jacobs at the Royal Free in September.

Pooley banked 1.2 litres of his plasma to help future Ebola patients before leaving for Freetown in October. Doctors do not need to seek his consent before using his plasma either for research or to treat a patient.

Six other Ebola survivors have been treated in European hospitals, including a Spanish nurse, a Norwegian doctor and a Ugandan medic treated in Germany.

In September, Pooley’s plasma was used to treat Dr Ian Crozier, a World Health Organisation doctor who worked at the same government hospital in Sierra Leone and who contracted the virus weeks after Pooley. He went on to survive, spending 40 days in hospital.

Jacobs said the hospital had been unable to obtain the experimental drug ZMapp, which was used to treat Pooley, because there was simply none in the world at the moment.

Save the Children has launched an investigation into whether Cafferkey contracted the virus outside its Kerry Town treatment centre, where she had treated Ebola patients. There have been suggestions that she may have caught the disease while out in the local community over the Christmas period.

Sources at other volunteer groups, including Médecins sans Frontières and Dublin-based organisation Goal, said they had no plans to overhaul their procedures in the wake of Cafferkey’s diagnosis. More NHS health workers are due to be trained and deployed to west Africa in the coming weeks, with nearly 40 known having flown out since 6 December.

Pauline Cafferkey, centre, leaving for Sierra Leone in November. Airport screening for people coming from affected areas is under review. Photograph: Tolga Akmen/LNP

The chief medical officer, Dame Sally Davies, conceded that the case raised questions over Ebola screening precautions. She said reports of queues for screening and equipment shortages at Heathrow were concerning and would be fixed before the next batch of volunteers are due to return in mid-January.

“Clearly, queuing and things like that are unacceptable and we will review. But we will let people who are well travel because they will not infect the public,” she said.

Meanwhile, the Scottish government and Scottish NHS agencies refused to disclose when they had been told that Cafferkey had warned officials at Heathrow she felt feverish, and had been given seven temperature tests – none of which detected an elevated temperature – before she was cleared to fly to Glasgow on Sunday.

Public Health England admitted on Tuesday evening that this raised questions about the effectiveness of current screening procedures at British airports. Dame Sally Davies, the chief medical officer for England, confirmed that Cafferkey was in the early stages of the disease while she was flying home.

Davies stressed the public health risks were therefore negligible but confirmed that the UK’s screening policies were being reconsidered. “The process does seem to have not been as good as we all want to see,” she said.

The Scottish government, which oversees screening and Scottish airports, and Greater Glasgow and Clyde NHS, which has responsibility for Glasgow airport, refused to confirm whether they shared Public Health England’s new concerns.

Health Protection Scotland launched an urgent effort to contact all other 70 passengers on board the BA flight to warn them to watch out for symptoms, soon after she was admitted with Ebola hours after arriving home.

“It is understood that protocols for screening the patient were followed and she was allowed to travel on the grounds that her temperature was checked repeatedly and she didn’t have a fever,” a Scottish government spokeswoman said.

“As the first minister [Nicola Sturgeon] made clear, the patient was not displaying any of the symptoms that would had put other people at risk.”