A surgeon who contracted Ebola while working in Sierra Leone was continuing treatment Sunday at a biocontainment unit in Nebraska where two other people with the disease have been successfully treated.

Dr Martin Salia, who was found to have Ebola on Monday, landed at Eppley airfield in Omaha on Saturday afternoon and was taken by ambulance to the Nebraska medical center, one of four US hospitals approved by the federal government to treat Ebola.

“We will do everything humanly possible to help him fight this disease,” Dr Phil Smith, medical director of the biocontainment unit at Nebraska medical center, said in a statement. “This is an hour-by-hour situation.”

Smith later added that Salia was “extremely ill”.

The hospital said the medical crew that accompanied Salia, 44, from west Africa determined he was stable enough to fly, but that the team caring for him in Sierra Leone indicated he was critically ill and “possibly sicker than the first patients successfully treated in the United States”.



The disease has killed more than 5,000 people in west Africa, mostly in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone. Of the 10 people treated for the disease in the US, all but one has recovered.

Salia’s ambulance to the hospital was accompanied by a single Nebraska state patrol cruiser and a fire department vehicle – a subdued arrival in contrast to the August delivery of Dr Rick Sacra, whose ambulance was flanked by numerous police cars, motorcycles and fire vehicles.

Salia has been working as a general surgeon at Kissy United Methodist hospital in the Sierra Leone capital of Freetown. It is not clear whether he was involved in the care of Ebola patients. Kissy is not an Ebola treatment unit, but Salia worked in at least three other facilities, United Methodist News said, citing health ministry sources.

Salia, a Sierra Leone citizen who lives in Maryland, first showed Ebola symptoms on 6 November, but tested negative. He tested positive on Monday.

The State Department said it helped facilitate the transfer of Salia; the US embassy in Freetown said he paid for the expensive evacuation. The travel costs and care of other Ebola patients flown to the US have been covered by the groups they worked for in west Africa.

Salia’s wife, Isatu Salia, said in a telephone interview that when she spoke to her husband early on Friday his voice sounded weak and shaky. But he told her “I love you” in a steady voice, she said.

The two prayed together, and their children, aged 12 and 20, are coping, Isatu Salia said, calling her husband “my everything”.

The Nebraska medical center spokesman, Taylor Wilson, said members of Salia’s family were not at the hospital on Saturday, but were expected to arrive “in the near future”.

Sierra Leone is one of the three west African nations hit hard by an Ebola epidemic this year. Five other doctors in Sierra Leone have contracted Ebola, and all have died.