American woman infected with Ebola heads back to U.S.

ATLANTA. KAZINFORM As an American woman infected with Ebola returns to the United States, a man hospitalized in New York City is waiting to learn whether he has the dire disease.

More and more, the deadly outbreak that has killed hundreds of people in West Africa is gaining ties to the United States. Missionary Nancy Writebol boarded a specially-equipped air ambulance Tuesday morning and headed from from Liberia to Dobbins Air Reserve Base in Georgia. Once she lands in Georgia midday Tuesday, she'll be rushed to Atlanta's Emory University Hospital -- one of four hospitals in the country with extensive isolation procedures, CNN reports. The hospital is just blocks away from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which helped design an isolation unit at Emory to be used if a CDC staff member needed treatment for a rare deadly disease. Writebol will be only the second person ever to be treated for Ebola in the United States. She contracted the disease in Liberia while working with SIM USA, a Christian mission group. "We're just grateful and very cautiously optimistic about how she's doing right now," Bruce Johnson, president of SIM USA, told CNN's "Erin Burnett OutFront." The first known Ebola patient to be treated in the United States, Dr. Kent Brantly, was making progress since he arrived in Atlanta from Liberia on Saturday, a U.S. official said. The doctor was working with Ebola patients in Liberia when he became ill. Like Writebol, Brantly took a highly experimental drugcalled ZMapp. Both of their conditions improved after taking the serum. But the gruesome disease is still ravaging West Africa. More than 700 people have died in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone due to Ebola, which can torment victims with profuse vomiting, uncontrollable bleeding and organ failure. Read more