Time magazine’s Person of the Year for 2014 is a group of people rather than a single individual, and one of them is Kaci Hickox, a nurse from Maine who traveled to West Africa to help treat Ebola patients.

In an article on its website Wednesday, Time announced that it had chosen “the Ebola Fighters” for the coveted award.

The group of medical workers honored by the magazine includes other volunteers like Hickox from Doctors Without Borders, and workers from local communities in West Africa who stepped forward to help as the deadly disease reached epidemic proportions in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone and spread to Nigeria and Mali.

Hickox’s story received international attention after she returned from more than six weeks of volunteer work abroad and was involuntarily quarantined in a tent in a New Jersey hospital’s parking lot, although she showed no symptoms of Ebola infection and tested negative.

National media and some from abroad rushed to the remote Maine town of Fort Kent when Hickox returned from New Jersey and Maine officials also sought to restrict her.

Hickox is quoted in the Time magazine article: “It is crazy we are spending so much time having this debate about how to safely monitor people coming back from Ebola-endemic countries when the one thing we can do to protect the population is to stop the outbreak in West Africa.”

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Time’s tradition started in 1927 with the “Man of the Year” and evolved to “Person of the Year” in 1999. Past recipients have included multiple presidents of the United States, India’s pacifist Mahatma Gandhi, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and last year’s recipient, Pope Francis.

Time’s managing editor, Nancy Gibbs, said in the article announcing this year’s choice that “the Ebola Fighters” are heroes.

“The problem with irrational responses is that they can cloud the need for rational ones. Just when the world needed more medical volunteers, the price of serving soared,” Gibbs wrote in the same paragraph that introduced Hickox as one of those honored.

Time’s choice came a day after MTV’s college network, mtvU, named Hickox its Woman of the Year.


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