The National Institutes of Health announced Thursday that it will admit an American healthcare worker who tested positive for Ebola while doing volunteer work in Sierra Leone.
The worker, who will be admitted Friday, will be the second Ebola patient to be treated at the Bethesda, Md., facility.
The facility is specifically designed to treat highly infectious diseases and has state-of-the-art isolation capabilities, NIH said.
Sierra Leone was hit the hardest by the West Africa outbreak, with 8,463 confirmed cases of the disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The outbreak has killed approximately 10,000 people in Sierra Leone, Guinea and LIberia, the CDC reported Wednesday.
Progress is being made in West Africa to combat the virus. A total of 116 new confirmed cases of Ebola were reported the week of March 8, compared with 132 the week before.
WHO officials have stressed that health officials need to remain vigilant and that the disease could easily flare up again.
This story originally published at 5:26 p.m. and has been updated since then.
