WASHINGTON: An American nurse who contracted Ebola while caring for a Liberian patient in Texas has been declared free of the virus.

The National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, just outside the capital will hold a press conference at 11:30 a.m. (1530 GMT) to discuss the details of Nina Pham’s release, a spokeswoman said.

Pham was the first US health care worker to be infected with Ebola while working inside the US, after Thomas Eric Duncan was admitted to Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas on Sept. 28.

Duncan, who is believed to have been infected in his native Liberia before traveling to Texas to visit family, died on Oct. 8.

Pham’s Ebola diagnosis was announced Oct. 12. She was initially hospitalized in Dallas at the hospital where she worked, but was transferred to a specialized facility, the NIH Clinical Center, for treatment on Oct. 16.

Her colleague, nurse Amber Vinson, was also infected while caring for Duncan.

Both women worked in the intensive care unit at the hospital and had extensive contact with Duncan when he sick, though it remains unknown exactly how they were infected.

Vinson’s family said earlier this week that she too was now free of the Ebola virus, which has killed more than 4,800 people in West Africa so far this year.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said a “breach of protocol” was to blame, and has since issued stricter guidelines for donning protective gear when caring for Ebola patients.

Ebola is spread though close contact with the sweat, vomit, blood or other bodily fluids of an infected person.

Health care workers are at particular risk of contracting Ebola. Late Thursday, a doctor in New York who had been working in Guinea was found to be infected with Ebola.

The 33-year-old doctor, identified in US media as Craig Spencer, arrived back in America’s largest city at JFK airport on Oct. 17.

He had been traveling from Guinea via Europe, after working with Ebola patients in West Africa for the charity Doctors Without Borders.

A total of nine people with Ebola have been cared for in the United States. Only the Liberian patient has died of the virus here.

Meanwhile, the West African nation of Mali announced its first case of Ebola, in a two-year-old girl who had recently been in Guinea. Most of the nearly 10,000 Ebola infections so far this year have been in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, according to the World Health Organization.

There is no drug on the market to treat Ebola, and no approved vaccine to prevent it the often deadly virus that first emerged in 1976.

The WHO said that Ebola vaccine trials could start in West Africa in December, with hundreds of thousands of doses potentially being rolled out by mid-2015.

A lack of skilled medical staff has been one of the major obstacles in the battle against Ebola. Health workers have paid a heavy price in the fight against the epidemic, with 244 deaths out of 443 cases.

And in Ivory Coast, up until now Ebola-free, a hunt was going on for a health worker from Guinea who may have fled across the border after taking fright when a patient he treated died.

EU leaders agreed Friday to boost aid to combat Ebola in west Africa by 400 million euros to one billion euros.

“We’re in a race against time on Ebola and we must address both the emergency situation and at the same time have a long term response,” Commission head Jose Manuel Barroso said Thursday.

African countries have also pledged to send more than 1,000 health workers to the most severely-hit countries.