A nurse in Spain has contracted Ebola, becoming the first person known to catch the disease outside the outbreak zone in West Africa during the current epidemic.
The nurse's illness illustrates the danger health care workers face not only in poorly equipped West African clinics, but also in the more sophisticated medical centres of Europe and the United States.
The Spanish nurse was transferred early on Tuesday to Madrid's Carlos III hospital and her husband was placed in quarantine.
The nurse, whose name has not been released, was said to be in stable condition.
She was part of the medical team that treated a 69-year-old Spanish priest, Manuel Garcia Viejo, who died in the same hospital late last month, Spain's health minister said on Monday.
The sick priest had been flown home from his post in Sierra Leone; the nurse is believed to have contracted the virus from him.
She went to a Madrid hospital with a fever on Sunday, 10 days after the priest died, and was placed in isolation.
The World Health Organisation confirmed there has not been a previous transmission outside West Africa in the current outbreak.
Speaking to Sky News, Professor John Sydney Oxford questioned how the nurse was infected when the necessary precautions should have been taken.
"I was shocked to see that she got infected in the hospital," he said. But he added that he did not think the Spanish case meant the virus would become "embedded" outside of West Africa.
The unprecedented Ebola outbreak this year has killed more than 3,400 people in West Africa, and become an escalating concern to the rest of the world.
It has taken an especially devastating toll on health care workers, sickening or killing more than 370 in the hardest-hit countries of Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone - places that already were short on doctors and nurses.
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