'Spanish Ebola Nurse Touched Face With Infected Glove'

A Spanish nurse may have become infected with Ebola when she touched
her face with a glove as she removed her protective suit after
treating a missionary who had the deadly virus, a doctor treating her
said Wednesday.

Health officials say Teresa Romero twice entered the room of Spanish
missionary Manual Garcia Viejo -- once to clean him and the second time
after he died on September 25, just days after being repatriated from
Sierra Leone.

Doctor German Ramirez of Madrid's La Paz-Carlos III hospital said
Romero told him she remembers she touched her face with her gloves as
she removed her protective suit after leaving the quarantine room at
the hospital where the missionary was being treated.

"She thinks she remembers that it was during the first time she
entered the room but we should continue to look into it," he told
reporters gathered outside the hospital.

"It seems like it was the gloves. The gloves touched the face,"
Ramirez said, adding the infected nurse had authorised him to speak to
the media.

"It is possible that this was not a mistake as such. It could simply
be an accident and logically, probably, she could not remember at the
beginning because of the state of her health."

Romero had said in an interview published in El Mundo on Wednesday
that she had "no idea" how she could have contracted the virus.

But in an interview Wednesday in the online edition of El Pais
newspaper, she said she thought she may have become infected when she
removed her protective suit.

"I think the mistake was when I removed the suit. I see it as the most
critical moment in which it could have happened but I am not sure,"
she told the newspaper by telephone from her room at the hospital
where she is being treated in isolation.

Romero is the first case of Ebola being transmitted outside of West
Africa, where a months-long outbreak has killed nearly 3,500 people
and infected at least twice as many.