Spain’s conservative Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy is calling for calm and promising transparency after details became public of his country’s botched response to the first person to person transmission of the deadly Ebola virus outside of Africa.

40-year old Teresa Romero Ramos became infected with the potentially deadly Ebola virus after treating a patient who later died probably touched her face with the gloves that were supposed to protect her.  She also didn’t find out she was infected until hearing about it in the media.  Teresa is being treated in isolation now, but getting there wasn’t easy.

She took some days off after being part of the team that cared for a Spanish priest who came down with Ebola while doing missionary work in West Africa. During that time, she began to feel the onset of the disease.  On 30 September she called her employer at Carlos III Hospital in Madrid, and told them that she had dealt with an Ebola patient.  But her temperature wasn’t yet at 38.6 degrees C – so she was referred to a neighborhood clinic where she was given Tylenol and sent home.  No action was taken days later when she called again to complain about her fever.

On Monday, almost a week since her initial complaints, Romero called Carlos III Hospital again to say her condition was worsening.  They told her not to come there, but to go to a local hospital near her home.  The paramedics transported her without wearing protective gear.

She told the staff at Alcorcon Hospital that she might be infected with Ebola.  While she waited for tests to come back, doctors kept her in a bed with in the emergency room, separated from other patients only by a thin curtain. 

“I asked the doctor for the result and he didn’t answer in a very clear way and that’s when I started to suspect,” Teresa said in an interview with local TV.  She checked the news on her smart phone, and word that she has Ebola had already leaked to the local media.

Eventually, Teresa was transferred to the hospital in Madrid with the real isolation unit, her employer Carlos III Hospital.  Her husband is also under observation in the sealed off sixth floor of the facility, as are four more people.

But the first fatality of unnecessarily twisted case of Teresa Romero Ramos isn’t human; it’s her dog Excalibur.  Madrid officials obtained a court order for putting it down.  And despite protests from Romero, her husband, and several animal rights protesters who mixed it up with cops outside the couple’s Madrid flat, the dog was euthanized instead of simply being put into quarantine for 21 days.

A US Centers for Disease Control report (.pdf link) says dogs can carry the Ebola virus, although they apparently don’t get sick, and there’s no record of a dog-to-human Ebola infection.