This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

A surgeon who contracted Ebola while working in Sierra Leone is in critical condition and possibly sicker than any patient to arrive in the US from the disease-ravaged region of west Africa, a spokesman from the Nebraska hospital where he is being treated said on Saturday.

Dr Martin Salia, a permanent US resident, arrived in Omaha on Saturday afternoon, having left Freetown on Friday by air ambulance. He was immediately transported to Nebraska medical center, where he will undergo treatment. An update on his condition was expected later on Saturday evening, spokesman Taylor Wilson told the Guardian.

“He is critically ill, a good deal sicker than our previous patients, and perhaps sicker than any patient that has been transported from west Africa,” Wilson said earlier.

Wilson said he was not sure if the patient’s condition had changed in flight, but Salia had been determined to be stable for transport before he left Sierra Leone.



Salia, 44, was not able to walk off the plane, as other patients brought to the US have been able to do. Instead, he was taken off the plane in an isopod, a special device designed to keep contagion from spreading. He was placed on a stretcher and loaded into an ambulance.

Wilson said the hospital hoped to be able to provide Salia with experimental therapy, including a convalescent serum that has been used to treat Ebola patients.



Salia lives in Maryland and travels regularly to Sierra Leone to treat patients at United Methodist Church’s Kissy hospital and other facilities in Freetown, his family told CBS Baltimore affiliate WJZ.



Isatu Salia, his wife, told the news channel during a tearful interview: “I’m worried for him.”

Isatu Salia said she hoped to join her husband in Nebraska. Wilson said the hospital’s biocontainment unit was equipped with a video conferencing system that patients have used to speak to family and friends.

Salia tested positive for the disease on Tuesday and was deemed well enough to travel to the US. The Freetown hospital, which is not an Ebola treatment center, closed after Salia tested positive and staff are under quarantine for 21 days, the United Methodist News reported.

Sierra Leone’s national Ebola response team was due to fumigate the hospital in the days after Salia’s diagnosis.

Salia is the sixth physician to fall ill with the disease in Sierra Leone, where 1,187 people have already died from the disease. The other five doctors died.

Experts say western countries have had better success at treating Ebola patients because of their advanced healthcare systems and ability to provide the best available supportive care. One patient, Liberian Thomas Duncan, died in the US. Eight others have survived.



“They say we should keep calm and everything’s going to be OK,” said Dr Salia’s son, Maada Salia. “So far, he’s responding to treatment, so I have no doubt that everything will come out successfully.”

Maada said his father did not work with Ebola patients, but understood the risks of working in the region of west Africa, where the current outbreak has killed nearly 5,200 people.

“I just hope they bring him here and find the right treatment, and everything should be OK by then,” he said.

Salia will be the third patient treated at Nebraska medical center, one of four hospitals in the country equipped with biocontainment units and staff highly trained to handle deadly infectious diseases.

The hospital has discharged two American Ebola patients who contracted the disease while working in Liberia. The first was Dr Richard Sacra, a surgeon who contracted the disease while working as a missionary in a Monrovia hospital. The second was Ashoka Mukpo, a freelance cameraman for NBC who contracted the disease while covering the outbreak.

The US was briefly free of Ebola patients, after Dr Craig Spencer was released on Tuesday from Bellevue hospital center in New York.