Spanish nursing assistant tests negative for Ebola

The Spanish nursing assistant who contracted Ebola while caring for two infected priests in a Madrid hospital, becoming the first person to contract the virus outside West Africa, appears to have overcome the deadly disease, the government said on Sunday as her husband called its response "lousy."

Tests on Teresa Romero, hospitalized earlier this month with a high fever and treated in an isolation unit in the Carlos III Hospital in central Madrid, gave a negative result for the virus on Sunday, it said in a statement. Romero has also been described as a nurse.

Usually patients must take another test within 72 hours to be given the all clear from the disease. Manuel Cuenca, microbiology director at the Carlos III Hospital, said a second test was planned within hours to confirm Romero's recovery.

Romero was treated with a drip of human serum containing antibodies from Ebola sufferers who had survived the disease and other drugs, which a government spokeswoman declined to name because she requested that no details be released about her treatment program. One was the experimental anti-viral medicine favipiravir, the newspaper El Mundo reported, according to Reuters.

Romero is the only known Ebola case in Spain. There are an additional fifteen people in hospital, including Romero's husband, under observation. Spanish authorities said none of them have shown symptoms of Ebola so far.

Javier Limon, Romero's husband, said in a filmed statement released by the family's spokesperson, Maria Teresa Mesa that he chose "to spend all these days alone focusing on her recovery, but now I can say from here that I am going to fight until the last drop of my blood to defend her honor and her dignity and I am going to prove at court how lousy the handling of the Ebola crisis has been in Spain." 

Mesa told reporters outside the hospital Sunday night that Romero was "doing spectacularly well" and is eager to leave the hospital as soon as she can.

"She's capable of getting out of bed and eating practically anything," said Mesa. 

Romero had treated, Miguel Pajares, who contracted the disease in Liberia and died in August and Manuel Garcia Viejo who died in September after contracting the virus in Sierra Leone. Romero told officials she remembered touching a glove to her face after leaving Pajares' hospital room. She entered his room twice — once to change his diaper and another time after he died to retrieve unspecified items.

Mesa has contradicted Spanish officials' accounts on how Romero might have been infected by saying she followed all protocols and does not remember the incident with the glove.

The 44-year-old nurse remained undiagnosed for days despite reporting she had a fever, one symptom of Ebola, and her case prompted recriminations over how prepared the country was to deal with the disease.

Before Romero's test result was released Sunday, hundreds of Madrid health care workers protested demanding the ouster of Spanish Health Minister Ana Mato, saying she should resign for the country's handling of Romero's infection and blaming government austerity cuts to national health care for allowing it to happen.

Health care unions have claimed they were badly prepared for the Ebola crisis in Spain and received substandard protective gear and training for putting the suits on and taking them off when dealing with suspected Ebola cases.

A regional Madrid health official came under harsh criticism for suggesting that Romero lied about her posing a risk to Spaniards because she did not tell the first doctor she saw after she felt sick that she had been among those treating Ebola patients.

The government has denied botching Ebola preparations, but changed protocols for dealing with the disease after Romero was infected to comply with World Health Organization guidelines.

Over the weekend, Spain accepted a request by American authorities to allow the U.S. to use two military bases in the country to support its efforts to combat Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

Meanwhile, Germany's foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, said at a gathering of health experts in Berlin on Sunday that the European Union could send a civilian mission to West Africa to help combat the Ebola outbreak.

Ebola has killed at least 4,546 people in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea in the recent outbreak, the World Health Organization said on Friday.

Wire services