MONROVIA, Liberia (AP) —
Officials in Liberia say one of the country’s best-known doctors has died of Ebola. At the same time, an American physician is being treated for the deadly virus.
These developments have highlighted the risks facing health workers trying to combat an outbreak that has killed more than 670 people in West Africa — the largest ever recorded.
The pastor of a North Carolina church says that a second American, a missionary working in the Liberian capital, also was taken ill and is being treated in isolation there. The Liberian physician who perished is Samuel Brisbane, a top health official who was treating Ebola patients at the country’s largest hospital, the John F. Kennedy Memorial Medical Center in Monrovia, when he fell ill.
Tolbert Nyenswah, an assistant health minister, says Brisbane died Saturday. A Ugandan doctor died earlier this month.
The American physician, 33-year-old Dr. Kent Brantly, was in Liberia helping to respond to the outbreak that has killed 129 people nationwide when he fell ill, according to the North Carolina-based medical charity, Samaritan’s Purse. A spokeswoman for the aid group, Melissa Strickland, says he’s receiving intensive medical care in a Monrovia hospital and is in stable condition.
The husband of the American missionary, Nancy Writebol, said she was gravely ill and in isolation in Monrovia. That’s according to the Rev. John Munro, pastor of Calvary Church in Charlotte, North Carolina.
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