British Ebola Patient, Will Pooley, Discharged From Hospital

Will Pooley, the first British national to contract the deadly tropical virus Ebola, has been discharged from a hospital in London, a spokesman said Wednesday.

Pooley, 29, a volunteer nurse who contracted the disease while on a five-week mission to help treat Ebola patients in a clinic in Kenema, Sierra Leone, was flown back to Britain on a Royal Air Force plane from the West African country 10 days ago, and had been receiving treatment at the Royal Free hospital in Hampstead, London, the Guardian reported. In the hospital's isolation unit, Pooley received the experimental drug ZMapp, which has been proven to treat Ebola in monkeys but has not yet been subject to trials on humans.

Robin Pooley, the patient’s father, reportedly said his son is doing “pretty well.”

Michael Jacobs, a doctor who heads the infectious diseases unit at Royal Free, had reportedly described Pooley as a "resilient and remarkable young man," after his admission there. At a press conference on Aug. 26, Jacobs had said that it would take more than a week to determine the outcome of Pooley’s treatment.

Spreading rapidly across West Africa, Ebola has claimed the lives of more than 1,500 people and infected more than 3,000 people in the region, according to the World Health Organization, which said, in a statement, that it estimated more than 20,000 people would be infected by the deadly disease before it would be contained, the Guardian reported.