Martin Salia is a surgeon who contracted the Ebola virus while treating patients in the west African country of Sierra Leone. He may soon be transferred to the United States for treatment.
The Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha is set to receive the patient on Nov. 15, making the surgeon the third person to be treated for Ebola at the facility.
Salia is a native of Sierra Leone, who is currently living in Maryland as a permanent resident of the U.S.
The physician first developed symptoms of Ebola on Nov. 6, while working with patients in one of the areas hardest-hit by the current epidemic. Tests for the virus originally came up negative, but a second test performed on Nov. 10 revealed the presence of infection.
"He will be evaluated by the medical crew on the Phoenix Air jet upon their arrival in Sierra Leone," University of Nebraska Medical Center officials said.
That hospital is one of only four in the U.S. equipped with isolation facilities capable of serving patients with highly contagious diseases.
Healthcare workers at the National Institutes of Health and the Emory University hospital in Atlanta are currently under a 21-day waiting period following the treatment of a pair of nurses, each diagnosed with Ebola infection.
Many patients at the Kissy United Methodist Hospital in Freetown, Sierra Leone fled the hospital as soon as it became known that a doctor there was diagnosed with the often-fatal disease. The facility did not directly care for people diagnosed with Ebola, but the physician also practiced at other hospitals that cared for the patients.
Included in the group leaving Kissy were a number of mothers who had given birth just hours before they checked out. Staff members at the hospital will be quarantined for 21 days, equal to the incubation time of the virus.
Ebola has taken the lives of more than 5,000 people in West Africa, mostly in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, including all five doctors diagnosed with the disease in the doctor's home country.
The 44-year-old surgeon is paying for his own travel on a specially equipped airplane in order to receive treatment in the United States. He will become the tenth patient sent to the country for treatment of Ebola.
Salia studied at the Pan African Academy of Christian Surgeons, which requires graduates to practice medicine in Africa for a period of four years. Although he could have performed his work anywhere on the continent, he chose to serve the people of Sierra Leone during the current epidemic.
Craig Spencer was the most recent Ebola patient treated in the United States. He was released from a New York hospital on Nov. 11.
