EBOLA nurse Pauline Cafferkey is to return to the country where she caught the killer virus to aid children affected by the epidemic.

More than 11,000 people died in the crisis which gripped Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone from 2013-16.

Cafferkey’s case was diagnosed when she returned to Scotland after volunteering at a treatment centre in Sierra Leone’s Freetown in late 2014. She was discharged in January 2015 but was readmitted to hospital three times.

The 41-year-old Glasgow medic will return to Sierra Leone next month to aid Street Child, which is working to help young people impacted by Ebola.

Around 12,000 youngsters are thought to have been orphaned, with 1400 considered critically at-risk and struggling to survive.

Cafferkey will take on a 10k run for the charity during the visit and, speaking to the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire programme, she said: “It’s where things kind of started for me and I’ve had a terrible couple of years.

“So it will be good to go back just for things to come full circle for me and a little bit of closure.

“Most people have been supportive if they know that I’m going back. I’ve had a few people, like family friends, who say ‘just be careful when you get back there’.”

However, Cafferkey said she is “excited” by the prospect and is “not going there with any trepidation”.

Discussing the impact of the disease in local communities, she went on: “The Ebola patients in Sierra Leone didn’t know what they were going home to, or who was left alive in their family. They might be going back to sheer hell.”

Last year, Cafferkey, who almost died twice as a result of her symptoms, was cleared of misconduct by the Nursing and Midwifery Council over allegations relating to her return to the UK.

It was claimed that she allowed an incorrect temperature to be recorded by Public Health England’s screening facility at Heathrow airport, and, realising that she had a raised temperature, left the screening area without reporting it to a member of staff.

Meanwhile, new analysis suggests weak border controls and urbanisation may have contributed to the Ebola outbreak’s severity.

Researchers claim relatively free movement of people between the three countries may have helped the disease spread and heavily built-up areas allowed cases to multiply.

A study published in the Nature journal found other neighbouring countries might have escaped being seriously blighted by the virus due to their tighter borders.

On the eventual border lockdown of the three effected nations in 2014, the paper – which was co-authored by scientists from the University of Edinburgh, America and Belgium – said: “It is difficult to ascertain whether the border closures themselves were responsible for the apparent reduction in cross-border transmissions, as opposed to concomitant control efforts or public information campaigns.

“However, even if border closures reduced international traffic, particularly over longer distances and between larger population centres, by the time that Sierra Leone and Liberia had closed their borders, the epidemic had become firmly established in both countries.”