The young Dallas nurse infected with Ebola was upgraded Tuesday to good condition after receiving a potentially lifesaving transfusion of blood plasma from an Ebola survivor.
Nina Pham — who contracted the virus while caring for ill-fated patient Thomas Eric Duncan — also released an upbeat statement.
“I’m doing well and want to thank everyone for their kind wishes and prayers,” she said. “I am blessed by the support of family and friends and am blessed to be cared for by the best team of doctors and nurses in the world here at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas.”
Pham, 26, got a transfusion of plasma from Dr. Kent Brantly, who contracted Ebola while caring for patients in West Africa, but beat the disease after getting a transfusion from a 14-year-old boy he successfully treated there. Brantly was also given the experimental Ebola drug ZMapp, which takes three months to manufacture and is currently unavailable.
Brantly has also donated plasma to Dr. Rick Sacra, a colleague in the Samaritan’s Purse missionary group, and to freelance TV cameraman Ashoka Mukpo.
Sacra beat Ebola, while Mukpo is still hospitalized in Nebraska — but tweeted Monday that he was “feeling like I’m on the road to good health.”
Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious-disease specialist at the Vanderbilt Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn., said, “There’s a long tradition in infectious disease of giving the plasma of patients who are recovered to new patients to use as treatment.
“Kent Brantly has recovered from Ebola, so his plasma is full of proteins, antibodies, that would glom onto the Ebola virus and prevent it from multiplying further,” he said.
Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings said Pham was “happy” to hear that her beloved pet dog, Bentley, was being cared for. The Cavalier King Charles spaniel was removed from her apartment on Monday and taken to the abandoned Hensley Field naval air base, where he is being housed in a “homelike environment” complete with toys and a bed, and is being cared for and monitored by workers from Dallas Animal Services.
Pham’s boyfriend has also been placed in quarantine, the Dallas Morning News reported.
Meanwhile, CDC Director Dr. Tom Frieden said authorities were monitoring the health of 76 people besides Pham who may have had contact with Duncan while he was sick. That is in addition to 48 others who had contact with him before he was hospitalized.
Frieden also expressed regret that he didn’t send CDC experts to Dallas immediately after Duncan’s illness.
“I wish we had put a team . . . on the ground the day the first person was diagnosed. That might have prevented [Pham’s] infection,” he told reporters during a teleconference from Atlanta.
Also Tuesday, billionaire Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said he was donating $25 million to the CDC to try to keep Ebola from becoming “a long-term global health crisis that we end up fighting for decades.”