A Cuban doctor makes a full recovery against the deadly Ebola virus at a local hospital in Geneva, and is already enroute to meet up with his family members back home on Saturday.
Dr. Felix Baez was amongst the 256 Cuban doctors and nurses who participated in relief activities against the Ebola outburst in West Africa earlier this year. The outbreak which has killed more than 6,000 people till date is one of the worst recorded.
At the request of the World Health Organization WHO, Baez was hospitalized in Geneva, whose head office is also situated in the city.
Dr. Baez contracted the disease in the worst hit country Sierra Leone. 106 out of a total of 138 health workers who caught the disease in Sierra Leone, have died, resulting in a much higher fatality rate than among health workers in the neighboring Guinea and Liberia.
At the hospital in Geneva, Baez received two drugs to fight the disease and spokesman said he was feeling much better after two days of treatment. Amongst the two drugs, one was the Canadian experimental ZMab and the other was the untested Favipiravir made by Japan’s Fujifilm. ZMab is a precursor to ZMapp, which has been used to treat several U.S. patients as well. While Favipiravir is included by WHO in its list of potential Ebola treatments.
Baez was the first case of Ebola in Switzerland and also Cuba’s first citizen to contract the deadly disease. He was treated in complete isolation at the hospital and at no point in time was there any risk of transmission to the masses.