NEW YORK — In a case underscoring the perils of caring for Ebola patients, a nurse in Spain has come down with the disease — the first time someone has caught the disease outside West Africa during the current epidemic.

The nurse's illness illustrates the danger that health care workers face not only in poorly equipped West African clinics, but also in the more sophisticated medical centers of Europe and the United States, said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University.

“At greatest risk in all Ebola outbreaks are health care workers,” he said.

The unprecedented Ebola outbreak this year has killed more than 3,400 people in West Africa, and become an escalating concern to the rest of the world.

It has taken an especially devastating toll on health care workers, sickening or killing more than 370 in the hardest-hit countries of Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone — places that already were short on doctors and nurses.

The Spanish nurse was part of the medical team that treated a 69-year-old Spanish priest, Manuel Garcia Viejo, who died in a Madrid hospital late last month.

The sick priest had been flown home from his post in Sierra Leone.

STOCKHOLM — Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano of Japan and U.S. scientist Shuji Nakamura won the Nobel Prize in physics today for the invention of blue light-emitting diodes — a new energy efficient and environment-friendly light source.The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the invention is just 20 years old, “but it has already contributed to create white light in an entirely new manner to the benefit of us all.”Akasaki, 85, is a professor at Meijo University and distinguished professor at Nagoya University. Amano, 54, is also a professor at Nagoya University, while the 60-year-old Nakamura is a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.The laureates triggered a transformation of lighting technology when they produced bright blue light from semiconductors in the 1990s, something scientist had struggled with for decades, the Nobel committee said.Using the blue light, LED lamps emitting white light could be created in a new way.“As about one fourth of world electricity consumption is used for lighting purposes, the LEDs contribute to saving the Earth's resources,” the committee said.