British Ebola survivor to return to Sierra Leone

The first Briton to be infected with the deadly Ebola virus has revealed he is going back to Sierra Leone to try and help with the struggle to control the disease.

William Pooley, a British nurse, survived Ebola after he was evacuated to Britain from Sierra Leone in an RAF fighter jet and successfully treated with the experimental drug ZMapp.

Despite initially assuring his parents he would not return, the 29-year-old has revealed he plans to go back to Sierra Leone, where hundreds of people have died from Ebola. He has called on David Cameron to do more to ensure an international effort is being made to get the epidemic in Africa under control.

“It's the least I could do to go back and return the favour to some other people, even just for a little while,” Mr Pooley told the Guardian.

“The more help they get the less chance there is they get sick. If they get sick they are just going to end up in a ward in Kenema with less chance than I had."

Mr Pooley was discharged from the Royal Free Hospital in London after spending more than a week in a specially designed isolation tent and has been at home with his family in Suffolk.

His family were at first pleased as his passport had to be incinerated when he was diagnosed. His mother said she does not want him to return but would be “very proud” of him if he did, considering he already knows what a difficult situation he would be working in.

In London Mr Pooley was treated in a £25,000 tent, which managed contamination by controlling the air pressure, colour coding areas and using heat-sealed containers to remove body waste.

In Sierra Leone conditions will be very different.

Mr Pooley added: “Those wards A and B when I first started were pretty grim. Corpses, blood, the place was really dirty - people just dying in quite unpleasant ways. When I first started there were not enough materials, there was no running water, no sheets or towels to clean a patient with.

“They might be incontinent, they are often confused, so you can imagine, with diarrhoea and vomiting, patients get in horrible condition."

While he was in Sierra Leone Mr Pooley helped save dozen of lives by making sure a hospital in Kenema, at the centre of the outbreak, remained open. He volunteered to treat patients when local nurses were too afraid of cobtracting the disease.

More than 1,500 people have died from Ebola in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Nigeria with around 57 per cent of those infected dying. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has warned there could be 20,000 more victims unless the disease is brought under control.

Mr Pooley said he was told he had the illness after developing a sore throat, headache and aches all over his body. He said the hardest thing was having to tell his parents, just before he was evacuated, that he had Ebola and only had a 50 per cent chance of surviving.