South Korean medical workers returned to their former routine on Sunday after undergoing a three-week quarantine following their one-month mission in an Ebola-hit African nation, the government here said Sunday.
Nine doctors and nurses, who were the country’s first batch of medical staff sent to Sierra Leone, “all returned home today in a healthy state as none of them showed any symptoms of the deadly virus,” the government said in a release.
After completing their mission of caring for patients in Goderich, near Sierra Leone’s capital of Freetown, in late December, the medical staff returned to South Korea at the end of last month and immediately were placed under a quarantine for further monitoring until Saturday.
“We’ve checked their physical and mental conditions twice a day, and the results showed that they are all fine both mentally and physically,” according to the release.
While the first team had initially consisted of 10, one staff member was moved to a German hospital in early January after the worker’s index finger came in contact with a needle while collecting blood from an Ebola patient. After being confirmed clean, the worker was discharged from the hospital last month.
To join global efforts to fight the deadly epidemic, South Korea has so far sent 24 medical workers to Sierra Leone, and offered a combined US$12.6 million in assistance.
According to the World Health Organization, the highly infectious virus is estimated to have killed more than 9,000 people since its outbreak in December 2013. (Yonhap)
