Nurse recovers from Ebola, leaves Madrid hospital

MADRID, Nov. 5 (UPI) -- Teresa Romero, the first known person to have contracted the Ebola virus outside West Africa, was released from a Madrid, Spain, hospital Tuesday.

The nurse, 44, who treated two missionaries who returned to Spain from West Africa and later died of the virus, was discharged from Carlos III Hospital, her employer. She spent nearly all of October in a hospital isolation ward, and offered her thanks in a statement, to doctors, her family and well-wishers, before she left.

"I'm here to give you my thanks, but I'm still very weak. I don't know what went wrong. I don't even know if something did go wrong. All I know is that I'm not bitter and I'm not blaming anyone."

She added she hoped her experience "served some purpose," and in reference to possible use of her blood in transfusions to benefit other Ebola patients, "If my blood can be used to cure other people, here I am."

Her colleague and head of the hospital's infectious disease unit, Jose Ramon Arribas, said she would require "time for a full recovery from a very dramatic event."

The Ebola epidemic has killed over 5,000 people this year, the overwhelming majority in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia.