Florida officials report record number of infections caused by ‘flesh-eating’ bacteria after Hurricane Ian – The Associated Press
When he heard news of the “flesh-eating bacteria,” Dr. Kent Brantly knew immediately what to do.
The pathologist took a few steps backward after hearing what happened Monday afternoon in Florida.
“I took a step and started feeling a little bit nauseous,” Brantly recalled, then he realized he was getting the “whole body” feeling and “sitting down was starting to feel like I was going to throw up,” he told reporters on a conference call from Texas.
That feeling lasted less than two hours. He went to the hospital and later underwent two surgeries to remove tissue, then was flown to New York where doctors performed a third surgery to remove the infected tissue.
Brantly, the first person diagnosed with Ebola who flew in from Dallas, said doctors gave him only a few hours to live.
“The second day into the hospital I had a tube going into my nose just to stay alive and I had to take one of these pills for diarrhea and that was the second day,” he said, but the doctors had given that medicine to “some of the sickest people in that hospital” anyway “so it wasn’t really a surprise when I got better,” said Brantly, 36.
He was tested for Ebola but was found negative.
Brantly is a former Marine who was deployed to West Africa in 2010 to help stop the spread of Ebola. His team of doctors had treated three Americans who were infected with Ebola in West Africa and had been caring for two more who were infected while in contact with him.
The World Health Organization said Tuesday that a nurse who contracted Ebola while working with a Liberian patient has the disease, but a doctor with no known personal relationship to one of the patients is quarantined in an isolation unit at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta.
Brantly said doctors diagnosed him with Ebola after he developed symptoms