Dallas Nurse Nina Pham, who became the first person to contract Ebola on U.S. soil while treating patient Thomas Eric Duncan, is now free of the virus and will be discharged from a special facility at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., the NIH says.
Pham’s discharge, scheduled for 11:30 a.m. ET, comes just a day after fellow nurse Amber Vinson’s family said she had been declared free of the virus and Dr. Craig Spencer, a physician who had treated Ebola patients in Guinea while working for Doctors Without Borders, was said to have the potentially deadly virus.
A news briefing at the NIH to announce Pham’s discharge will be livestreamed here.
Last week, Pham appeared in a video in her isolation ward at Dallas Health Presbyterian Hospital, where she worked and caught the disease from Thomas Eric Duncan, who later died. In the video, apparently shot just before she was transferred to the NIH facility, she appeared in good spirits.
The cases of Pham and Vinson, who also became infected at Dallas Health Presbyterian, caused the hospital and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to review and upgrade their safety protocols for dealing with Ebola patients.
In a statement released Friday by Dallas Health, the hospital, CEO Barclay Berdan said: “[We] know we have seen and experienced what no other hospital has. We know that sharing our expertise may help to save lives, and we are eager to help hospitals learn.”
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