A file photo of the way the Spanish priest was carried to Madrid from Liberia

A British healthcare worker who contracted Ebola in Sierra Leone – the first Briton to catch the deadly virus – was flown home for treatment on Sunday, as the World Health Organization confirmed another foreign medic, said to be a  Senegalese, had caught the disease.

Britain’s Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond authorised the repatriation of the male medical worker – whose identity has not been disclosed – after he was analysed by doctors from Britain and Sierra Leone.

Britain’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer John Watson said final approval for the evacuation was given on the ground in Sierra Leone by a team of physicians who had arrived on a specially equipped Royal Air Force cargo plane.

The Boeing C-17 left the Sierra Leonean capital Freetown bound for Britain at around 1250 GMT.

Upon arrival at the RAF Northolt air base in Britain, he will be transported to an isolation unit at the Royal Free Hospital in London, the department said.

The hospital has the only high-level isolation unit for treatment of infectious diseases in Britain and has a team of specially trained staff.

“Protective measures will be strictly maintained to minimise the risk of transmission to staff transporting the patient to the UK and healthcare workers treating the individual,” Paul Cosford, director for health protection at state body Public Health England, said in a statement.

The worst ever outbreak of the hemorrhagic fever has so far killed at least 1,427 people, mostly in Sierra Leone, Liberia and neighbouring Guinea. Five deaths have been reported in Nigeria. And in Congo Democratic Republic,  where Ebola virus was diagnosed for the first time in 1976, the authorities  declared an outbreak  in  the  northern Equateur province on Sunday. The declaration came  after two out of eight cases tested came back positive for the deadly virus, Health Minister Felix Kabange Numbi said.

A mysterious disease has killed dozens of people in Equateur in recent weeks but the World Health Organization had said on Thursday it was not Ebola.

“I declare an Ebola epidemic in the region of Djera, in the territory of Boende in the province of Equateur,” Kabange Numbi told a news conference.

The region lies about 1,200 km (750 miles) north of the capital Kinshasa.

Numbi said that one of the two cases that tested positive was for the Sudanese strain of the disease, while the other was a mixture between the Sudanese and the Zaire strain — the most lethal variety. The outbreak in West Africa that has killed at least 1,427 people in West Africa since March is the Zaire strain.

The World Health Organization said on Thursday that the disease which had killed at least 70 people in Equateur was a kind of hemorrhagic gastroenteritis.

Two U.S. doctors, who contracted Ebola in Liberia and were evacuated to the United States, left hospital last week after receiving treatment with an experimental drug, ZMapp. It was not clear what role the pharmaceutical played in their recovery.

Three African healthcare workers have also improved since receiving ZMapp in Liberia. Its U.S.-based manufacturer, Mapp Biopharmaceutical, has said limited supplies of the drug have already been exhausted.