MADRID—A Spanish medical worker tested positive for Ebola after treating an Africa-based missionary who had been infected with the virus and flown to Madrid, officials said Monday, reporting the first suspected transmission outside West Africa.
Spanish medical-worker representatives expressed alarm over the case, saying it raised questions over the adequacy of the country’s medical procedures for treating Ebola patients and preventing the spread of the disease in the country and beyond. The female medical worker was infected while working at Madrid’s Carlos III hospital, which had been specially prepared to treat the disease.
Spanish officials sought to play down any sense of crisis but said they were unable to explain what went wrong.
“We’re investigating what was the source of the contact, verifying if all the established protocols were followed to the letter,” Ana Mato, Spain’s health minister, told a televised news conference. “Rest assured that we are taking all measures to guarantee the best medical care for the patient and the safety of the medical staff and the wider population,” she added.
The infected medical worker, whose name wasn’t disclosed, was part of a team that treated Brother Manuel García Viejo, a 69-year-old Spanish missionary, before he died of Ebola on Sept. 25. He had been flown to Madrid three days earlier from Sierra Leone, where he served as medical director of a hospital.
Health officials said the infected medical worker had been in contact once with Brother García Viejo while he was alive and with his clothes after he died.
She registered a slight fever on Sept. 30, health officials said, and was admitted to a suburban Madrid hospital on Sunday. The infection was confirmed by two tests, the second one on Monday, they said.
Antonio Alemany, director of primary health care in the Madrid region, said the medical worker was in a stable condition and running a fever that hasn’t surpassed 101.48 degrees Fahrenheit.
She was kept in isolation at the suburban facility, Mr. Alemany said at the news conference, brushing aside criticism by some medical workers that the patient wasn’t being held in a special quarantine room.
“Isolation is the only requirement,” he said, urging calm and repeating several times that Ebola is transmitted only via direct contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person.
Mr. Alemany said officials were trying to determine the number of people with which the medical worker, a married woman with no children, had been in touch recently and were taking the temperature of those they had tracked down twice a day.
The infected medical worker was one of 30 at Carlos III hospital who had treated Brother García Viejo and a Spanish priest, the Rev. Miguel Pajares, who died of Ebola there in August, five days after being flown to Madrid from Liberia.
All of those medical workers are undergoing medical tests, officials said.
The Carlos III hospital had been selected and prepared to treat the Rev. Pajares, the first European to be repatriated after being infected during the latest Ebola outbreak. At the time, the Spanish government distributed protocols to all other hospitals and primary health-care centers in Madrid on how to treat the disease.
“We don’t know whether any errors were made,” Mr. Alemany said. “We’re investigating what the mechanism of transmission could have been.”
Some Spanish medical-worker representatives said the case should spark a re-evaluation of the procedures and facilities used to treat Ebola patients.
“Something went wrong,” Máximo González Jurado, head of Spain’s General Nursing Council, told Spanish news agency EFE. “They need to establish if the protocol is correct or not correct so that a case like this, that never should have happened, doesn’t happen again.”
Daniel Bernabeu, a radiologist who is president of the Amyts doctors association, said on Monday that he felt “a mix of consternation and indignation” over news of the case.
“Work has been carried out according to the established protocols, and it will be necessary to analyze exactly in what circumstances the contagion occurred,” Dr. Bernabeu told EFE. “Any contact [with an infected patient] carried with it a risk the government had to assume.”
In August, Dr. Bernabeu raised questions about the decision to bring the Rev. Pajares to Spain rather than treat him in Liberia, saying Spanish medical facilities may not have been prepared to handle the disease.
The World Health Organization estimates that the latest Ebola outbreak has killed more than 3,400 people.
By Jeannette Neumann at jeannette.neumann@wsj.com and Ilan Brat atilan.brat@wsj.com
Kigalihe@WST
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