American Treated for Ebola Released From NIH Hospital

The American patient being treated for Ebola at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) was declared Ebola-free and released on Thursday.

The patient, whose identity has not been released, was volunteering for the aid group Partners in Health (PIH) in Sierra Leone, one of the three countries hit hardest during the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. The patient had arrived for treatment at the NIH treatment unit in Bethesda, Md., on March 13.

PIH says the patient, who had two Ebola tests come back negative before NIH declared them Ebola-free, was one of several of the aid group’s volunteers who were brought back to the United States for monitoring. None of the other volunteers were infected.

The group says two of its volunteers who returned to the U.S. for precautionary monitoring are heading back to Sierra Leone to continue their work. “We’re cheering here in rural Liberia and in Sierra Leone, and are sure our co-workers in Boston and Haiti and Rwanda and Peru and elsewhere are too,” Dr. Paul Farmer, co-founder and chief strategist for PIH, said in a statement.

The PIH volunteer is the second person with Ebola to be successfully treated for Ebola at the NIH. The facility’s team also treated Dallas nurse Nina Pham, who contracted Ebola last fall after treating Thomas Eric Duncan, the first person to be diagnosed with Ebola in the U.S.

To date, there have been 25,178 cases of Ebola in Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia and 10,445 have died from the disease.