The Scottish nurse who contracted Ebola while volunteering in west Africa has been named as Pauline Cafferkey, the first person to be diagnosed with the virus on UK soil.

Cafferkey arrived in London for specialist treatment on Tuesday morning after being transferred by military aircraft from hospital in Glasgow.

The healthcare worker had asked Save the Children, the charity she was volunteering with in Sierra Leone, not to name her but her identity has been reported widely.

Her identity was released as David Cameron sought to allay public concern over the virus as he chaired an emergency Cobra meeting. “Safety measures are working well – and the risk to the public is extremely low,” the prime minister said.

Cafferkey becomes the second Ebola patient to be treated in the UK after the British nurse William Pooley, who contracted the virus last August. Pooley was successfully treated at the Royal Free hospital in north London, where Cafferkey is undergoing treatment.

A nurse for 16 years and originally from Fife, Cafferkey was based in Blantyre, South Lanarkshire, and was one of 30 NHS volunteers to help treat Ebola victims at specialist hospitals in Sierra Leone in November. She worked in the highly infectious “red zone” near Freetown and wrote in a diary for the Scotsman how she had been inspired to become a health worker after seeing images of the Ethiopian famine in the 1980s.

Cafferkey admitted feeling unwell during the first week of her stay in Sierra Leone and described the “horrendous” conditions of working in soaring temperatures. She wrote: “The area where the Ebola patients are is classed as the infective Red Zone, and the area surrounding it, the safe Green Zone. Bizarrely we find ourselves saying ‘good luck’ to our colleagues prior to entering the Red Zone, a sobering reminder of what we are doing.”

Cafferkey was one of 30 NHS volunteers to fly from Sierra Leone to Heathrow airport via Casablanca in Morocco on Sunday, before she flew on to Glasgow.

[via Guardian UK]