Craig Spencer, the doctor who was diagnosed with Ebola days after returning to New York City from Guinea, where he was treating patients infected with the deadly disease, has been cleared of the virus and is due to be discharged from the hospital on Tuesday.
“After a rigorous course of treatment and testing, Dr Craig Spencer – the patient admitted and diagnosed with Ebola disease virus at HHC Bellevue hospital center – has been declared free of the virus,” New York City’s health and hospitals corporation said in a statement on Monday evening.
Spencer was in Guinea treating Ebola sufferers as a volunteer with Doctors Without Borders, known internationally as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). The virus has killed nearly 5,000 people in west Africa.
Spencer has been in isolation at Bellevue hospital in New York City, where he was undergoing treatment. Cleared of the virus, Spencer no longer poses a public health risk and is due to be released from the hospital on Tuesday.
After he was diagnosed, health officials were monitoring four people who had close contact with him before his admission to the hospital, including his fiancee.
According to the World Health Organization, men who recover from the disease can still transmit the virus through their semen for up to seven weeks after recovery.
A press conference with city and health officials will be held on Tuesday after he is discharged.
Spencer’s diagnosis sparked a prickly international debate on how returning healthcare workers should be treated, after the governors of New York and New Jersey introduced a mandatory 21-day Ebola quarantine for anyone returning from the three west African countries worst affected by Ebola. Amid pressure from the White House, the governors backed off the plan, but not before it inspired similar policies in states across the US.
Spencer is the first person to be successfully treated for Ebola in the US at a hospital not equipped with a specialist unit. Everyone else to be treated for the virus in the US and recover from it has been transferred to one of the special units. Thomas Eric Duncan, the first person to be diagnosed with the virus in the US, was not transferred to one of the units; he died eight days after his diagnosis.
