Martin Deahl, who returned from Africa with nurse who has virus, asks why volunteers are allowed to go home on public transport

A doctor who sat next to Britain’s second Ebola patient on a plane returning from Africa has accused health officials of jeopardising public safety by allowing at-risk volunteers to use public transport and enter crowded places once they arrive back in the UK.

Dr Martin Deahl, who returned from west Africa with the Scottish nurse who was diagnosed on Monday with the virus, told the Guardian the “utterly illogical” Public Health England rules made “a complete mockery of the quarantine arrangements”.

He described the scenes at Freetown airport in Sierra Leone, where up to 30 volunteers who had met to travel back to the UK said goodbye ,“kissing and hugging” one another – including the nurse. Ebola is not contagious before patients develop symptoms, and Scottish health authorities have confirmed that the nurse had none until she arrived home.

Under current guidelines, health workers who have been in direct contact with Ebola victims are allowed to catch public transport once they arrive at a UK airport to travel home – but once they are at home they are told not to catch buses, trains or planes or enter crowded places.

“The ridiculous thing about this is the advice says once we are home we shouldn’t use public transport or go into crowded places, or if we do it should just be for short journeys of less than an hour, and yet they were quite happy to let us go home disperse from UK airports on the underground, on flights to Glasgow, which just makes a complete mockery of the quarantine arrangements,” Deahl said.

“It just begs the question whether they gave that advice because they didn’t want to spend the money on taking us home. It’s utterly illogical and I’d like to see someone at Public Health England try and justify and explain why – if they said we weren’t to go into crowded places or public transport once we were home – why people could use public transport to get from the airport.”

Deahl, from Newport in Shropshire, was one of 30 NHS volunteers to help tackle the Ebola virus in Sierra Leone. He flew back to Heathrow airport via Casablanca on Sunday night, sitting next to the nurse who has since been diagnosed with early stages of the virus.

The woman, named as Nurse Pauline Cafferkey, arrived for specialist treatment at the Royal Free hospital in north London on Tuesday after being flown to RAF Northolt in a military plane.

Deahl said it was “like a reunion” when the 30 volunteers met in Freetown to return to the UK and that many fellow health workers would have had direct contact with the Scottish Ebola patient.

“In terms of who talked to her and who might have hugged and kissed her the answer is probably quite a lot of people because everybody was talking to everybody else to catch up on what had happened,” he said. Deahl described the woman as “quiet, unassuming, terribly committed to what she was doing”.

He also criticised the “totally inadequate” facilities for testing at-risk health workers once they landed at Heathrow airport, which he said increased the chances of cross-infection. He said nurses were herded into several overcrowded “tiny poky little offices” and had to wait up to an hour to be checked over. The temperature testing kits that health workers are given to take home had run out by the time he got seen, Deahl said. “The facilities for doing temperatures and the suite of rooms they were using were totally inadequate for the numbers coming through,” he said. “We were all crowded together and queueing together so given what’s happened the chances of cross-infection, just from that experience, were high – just from being herded together at Heathrow in a ridiculously small space.”

The health workers were allowed to leave Heathrow after having their temperatures checked, but they are all assessed as category 3 risk – meaning they are advised to take precautions such as to avoid public transport and crowded places for 21 days once they are home.

The patient, who is thought to be a nurse with NHS Lanarkshire, was taken into the UK’s high-level isolation unit at the Royal Free – the unit that successfully treated British nurse William Pooley, who contracted Ebola in August.

The hospital said: “The Royal Free hospital can confirm that it is expecting to receive a patient who has tested positive for Ebola. The patient will be treated in the high-level isolation unit (HLIU).”

The nurse was admitted to one of Scotland’s main infectious diseases units at Gartnavel hospital in Glasgow on Monday morning after falling sick only a few hours after returning from two months volunteering at a Save the Children Ebola treatment unit in Sierra Leone.

Health experts treating the nurse, the first case of Ebola to be diagnosed on UK soil, said she was “quite stable” and showing few signs causing clinical concern, raising hopes she would survive the disease.

Dr Alisdair MacConnachie, a consultant in infectious diseases for NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, who had been treating the patient, said she had had no contact with other parts of the NHS or any accident and emergency facility.

“She [is] quite stable and not showing any great clinical concern at the minute,” he said.

Asked about the patient’s prospects, he said that being clinically stable at this stage “should translate into a good prognosis”.

Urgent steps were being taken by officials with Health Protection Scotland and Public Health England to trace scores of passengers on the nurse’s Royal Air Maroc flight into the UK from Casablanca in Morocco, and the 71 passengers on her internal British Airways connection – BA 1478 – from Heathrow to Glasgow on Sunday night.