Havana, Dec 29 (EFE).- Cuba’s Dr. Felix Baez Sarria, who contracted the Ebola virus in Sierra Leone and was able to overcome the disease, has announced that he will return to the African country in early 2015 to continue his work in the fight against the epidemic.
“I’ll return in the first days of January. I feel well both physically and emotionally – my recovery went well, I’m rested and am enjoying the company of my family,” he said in a statement published Monday in the official daily Granma.
The Cuban internal medicine specialist, 43, returned to Cuba in early December, after being released from the Geneva Cantonal University Hospital, where he underwent two experimental treatments for Ebola.
“I was always convinced that I would overcome the disease and I told my companions:’Don’t worry, I’ll be back,'” Baez said.
Cuba sent three brigades of doctors and nurses to the West African countries most affected by the Ebola epidemic. The first of them, made up of 165 volunteers, traveled to Sierra Leone at the beginning of October, after which another 52 went to Liberia and 38 to Guinea.
According to the latest data from the World Health Organization, or WHO, a total of 19,340 people have been infected by Ebola in the three West African countries this year and of those, 7,518 have died from the epidemic, considered the worst since the virus first surfaced in 1976.
Of those infected, 2,571 were in Guinea, 7,830 in Liberia and 8,939 in Sierra Leone, the three African countries where the Ebola contagion has raged since last May.
Written by laprensasa.com, CubaSí
December 29, 2014
