Time magazine’s ‘Person of the Year’ includes local Ebola fighters

They beat out Taylor Swift, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Alibaba founder Jack Ma for Time magazine’s “Person of the Year.” Who was it? The magazine’s editors announced that workers who fought Ebola this year were times, “People of the Year.” In an essay explaining the magazine’s choice, Time’s editor, Nancy Gibbs, wrote: “Ebola is a war, and a warning. The global health system is nowhere close to strong enough to keep us safe from infectious disease, and ‘us’ means everyone, not just those in faraway places where this is one threat among many that claim lives every day. The rest of the world can sleep at night because a group of men and women are willing to stand and fight.” Among those honored by Time was Dr. Kent Brantly, the first person to be treated on U.S. soil for Ebola. Brantly worked at JPS in Fort Worth, prior to going to Liberia to fight Ebola. Brantly, 33, who was infected with Ebola while working as a missionary doctor in Liberia, became a household name on Aug. 2 as cable-news outlets showed him walking, covered in protective gear, into the entrance at Emory in Atlanta. Brantly now says his new mission is to raise awareness about the Ebola outbreak that has infected more than 13,000 people in West Africa, killing almost 5,000. “If I were still in Liberia, I would be treating 50 patients in an Ebola treatment unit, and here, with this platform that I’ve been given, hopefully my message can have an effect that will impact and help thousands,” he said in Nov. in an interview. The awards also included those medical personnel at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital who treated Ebola patient Thomas Duncan, including Nina Pham, who graduated from Texas Christian University’s nursing program. – Robert Francis and reports from Washington Post/Bloomberg