WORCESTER — The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that Dr. Richard A. Sacra had tested negative for an Ebola relapse, UMass Memorial Medical Center announced in a statement Sunday night. Sacra was removed from the isolation unit at the hospital.
The Holden doctor, who contracted Ebola in Africa over the summer, will continue to be treated for the upper respiratory infection that prompted his hospitalization on Saturday.
Sacra, who had been treated and declared free of the deadly virus in Nebraska late last month, was initially put in isolation as a precaution, Dr. Robert Finberg, an infectious-disease expert leading Sacra’s team of doctors, said earlier Sunday at a news conference at the hospital.
“He seems to feel better today than he did yesterday,” Finberg said, though Sacra still has a cough and a fever. Finberg said Sacra was eating, improving, and in good spirits as he awaited word from the CDC, which had also confirmed that Sacra was Ebola-free in three blood tests after his treatment in Nebraska. Sacra told his doctors “categorically” that his new illness did not feel like Ebola, Finberg said.
“People who have Ebola don’t feel like eating,” Finberg said. “The fact that he’s eating and he feels pretty good, I think is a very good sign.”
Sacra’s wife is not ill, Finberg said, and she is not being kept in isolation. He said the public is in no danger of Ebola exposure.
Also Sunday, Ashoka Mukpo, a 33-year-old activist who is the fifth American to develop Ebola symptoms in West Africa, began his journey back to the United States for treatment.
Mukpo, who grew up in Providence, is being transported to the same facility where Sacra received treatment, Nebraska Medical Center.
Mukpo was working as a cameraman for NBC in Liberia last week when he became ill.
Bruce Johnson, president of the SIM USA missionary group with which Sacra works, said in a news release that Sacra first visited a Boston-area hospital emergency room Saturday morning because of a persistent cough and low-grade fever and concern that he might be getting pneumonia.
Johnson said Sacra was transferred to UMass Memorial for observation as a precaution under CDC guidelines.
Sacra, 51 and a member of the University of Massachusetts Medical School faculty, is one of four US health-care workers who contracted Ebola in Liberia while fighting the epidemic, which has killed at least 3,000 people. Sacra has spent much of the last 20 years in Liberia, where he worked as a medical missionary from 1995 to 2010. This summer, he worked delivering babies in a hospital in the nation’s capital, Monrovia.
He was evacuated in August, and within a week of falling ill was being treated at Nebraska Medical Center, the largest of the nation’s four biomedical containment facilities.
A week before he was once again hospitalized, Sacra spoke publicly about his ordeal.
Full recovery was expected to take three to four months, he said, after which he expected he would return to the country he called his adopted second home, aiming to help those who do not have access to the same comprehensive treatment he received.
“We love the people,” he said then. “It’s an affiliation that God has put in our hearts.”