A BRADFORD consultant home after six weeks fighting Ebola in West Africa tonight vowed to return in March if the deadly virus is still claiming lives.

Professor John Wright , who is based at Bradford Royal Infirmary, had the task of setting up an Ebola Treatment Centre out in the bush in Moyambe ready for patients.

Before he left last weekend, the mini-hospital about 100 miles from Freetown in Sierra Leone had just got through its first week of treating patients and celebrated its first survivor, he said.

There were 16 patients admitted initially but numbers will increase and Prof Wright will keep up a daily briefing with the hospital director there.

"Potentially I'll be going back out in March but I hope it will be finished by then," he said.

Ebola treatment and isolation centres and a community change approach encouraging safer burials, better hygiene and reported suspected cases earlier should all help to that, he added.

Prof Wright, whose blog has been featured on the Telegraph & Argus website, said he was starting to settle back into normal life with his wife and three grown-up daughters but his heart went out to his colleague, Glasgow nurse Pauline Cafferkey, who is now being treated for the virus at a specialist isolation unit at the Royal Free Hospital in north London.

They had shared the same flight back to the UK on Sunday.

"It could have been anyone of us," Prof Wright said.

"My heart goes out to my colleague and I hope she makes a swift recovery. We are all thinking of her.

"As for me, I am well. I'm checking my temperature twice daily and ringing it into Public Health England.

"They did what they had to do at the airport screening wise when our group got back to the UK, you are not infectious unless you have a fever.

"If you get a fever you notify Public Health, that's what happened and that's the whole point of screening. Ebola is not a very infectious agent, it's very difficult to catch. You catch it from body fluids or from dead people."

Despite that, Prof Wright said he had imposed his own no-touch policy for the next couple of weeks - including him having his own bedroom.

"That feeling that it could have been me has made me more circumspect," he said.

He is planning on returning to work on Monday but will not be seeing patients for three weeks, instead he will be focusing on research and his Born in Bradford work.

He leads the project at the Bradford Institute for Health Research which is tracking the health of 13,500 children born at Bradford Royal Infirmary between 2007 and 2010.