Nurse Who Caught Ebola Sues Dallas Hospital Where She Worked

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Nina Pham, a nurse who contracted Ebola while treating a man who died of the disease, sued the Dallas hospital where she worked, her attorney’s office said without elaborating.

Pham and another Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas nurse, Amber Vinson, developed Ebola after caring for Thomas Eric Duncan, a Liberian who died in October from the blood-borne pathogen that causes severe bleeding and organ failure.

Almost 10,000 people have died in the most-recent outbreak of the sickness, which started last year in the western African nations of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization.

Among the casualties was a bodyguard to Sierra Leone’s vice president, Samuel Sam Sumana, who is now quarantined.

More than 14,000 people who were infected have survived. New cases continue to be reported. On average, the disease is fatal to about 50 percent of those who get it, according to the World Health Organization.

Pham and Vinson were part of the first medical staff to treat a confirmed case of Ebola in the U.S.

Once diagnosed, Pham was transfered from the Dallas hospital to the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and placed in a special isolation unit.

Vinson was treated at the Emory University hospital in Atlanta and also recovered.

Pham, who told reporters upon her release that she felt “fortunate and blessed,” later met with President Barack Obama and U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Matthews Burwell at the White House.

Duncan, who died Oct. 8, has been the only Ebola fatality in the U.S. He is one of four people to have been treated in the U.S. after a confirmed diagnosis. More than 400 people were monitored by the CDC after suspected exposure.