Doctors at the Royal Free Hospital in London have discharged Pauline Cafferkey from their care - for the second time - and say she has made a full recovery from Ebola.
Cafferkey first contracted Ebola virus disease (EVD) in December 2014 while working at a treatment center in Sierra Leone, one of the three West African countries worst affected by the biggest Ebola epidemic in history.
She was successfully treated for Ebola hemorrhagic fever and discharged in January 2015, reports medicalnewstoday.com. But in October, she had to be readmitted to the hospital’s high-level isolation treatment unit after the virus - which had lingered in her brain - caused her to develop life-threatening meningitis.
The statement from the hospital notes that Cafferkey has “made a full recovery from Ebola and is no longer infectious.”
While this is the first known case of Ebola virus causing meningitis, there is evidence that it can hide in certain parts of the body of EVD survivors. For example, live Ebola virus was found in the eye of an EVD survivor two months after recovery.
