MEDICAL bosses are reassuring East Lancashire residents that they have contingency plans in place should there be an Ebola outbreak in the area.

It comes after health worker Pauline Cafferkey was confirmed as the first person in the UK to be infected with the virus after she returned to Glasgow from Sierra Leone. She is now receiving treatment in a specialist centre in London.

Ian Stanley, acting executive medical director at the East Lancashire Hospitals Trust, said should a case be discovered, in the region, plans were in place.

He said: “Our plan follows the national guidelines that have come from the government and their World Health Organisation partners. “Trust staff have been briefed on what they should do and are prepared to respond if necessary.

“We remind the public that, for Ebola to be transmitted from one person to another, contact with blood or other body fluids is needed. As such, the risk to the general UK population remains very low.”

To catch Ebola, which has reached epidemic proportions in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia, you need to make direct contact with the body fluids of someone who has Ebola and is also sick and showing symptoms.

Symptoms include fever, sore throat, muscle pain and headaches, which are generally followed by vomiting, diarrhoea and a rash, along with decreased function of the liver and kidneys. The trust has given training on how to put on protective equipment in the case of dealing with an Ebola patient to staff in the emergency department and the urgent care centre.

The hospitals’ lead clinicians have also been working in the laboratory and with domestics.

Information posters on Ebola are displayed in all UCCs, A&E, the medical assessment unit, the ambulatory care departments, X-Ray and all of the outpatients clinics.

Sister Cathy Fallon, who works in the emergency department at Royal Blackburn Hospital, spent Christmas with a contingent of NHS volunteers, who travelled to West Africa to help those with the Ebola virus. And Major Kathleen Higgins, from Brierfield, an Army reservist and NHS nurse, was also set to fly to Sierra Leone to help with the fight.