Condition of NIH Ebola patient changed to ‘critical’

The condition of an Ebola patient being treated at the National Institutes of Health has worsened to “critical,” the NIH said Monday. 

{mosads}The patient is an American healthcare worker who got the disease while working in Sierra Leone and was transported back to the NIH, arriving Friday. The previous condition was “serious.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is tracing the contacts of this patient and people who might have been exposed are being flown back to the United States for monitoring. 

Four Americans arrived at the University of Nebraska Medical Center earlier on Monday for observation.

The NIH says that it currently has no “pending admissions” of more people who might have been exposed. 

If more people are flown back for observation, they will be near either the University of Nebraska, the NIH, in Bethesda, Md., or Emory University in Atlanta, and will be monitored for symptoms and self-isolate “as appropriate,” the CDC said on Saturday.

More than 10,000 people worldwide have died from Ebola; nearly all of the victims lived in Sierra Leone, Liberia or Guinea, according to the World Health Organization. In the fall, the issue received major attention in the United States after two nurses contracted the disease after treating a man at a Dallas hospital. 

The worst of the disease seems to have passed, though. President Obama said last month that the U.S. had “risen to the challenge” of Ebola and that all but 100 of the 2,800 U.S. troops sent to West Africa to fight the disease would return home by the end of April.