Mukpo was admitted to a hospital in Nebraska on Monday.
By The American Bazaar Staff
NEW YORK: Ashoka Mukpo, the freelance cameraman for NBC News who is infected with Ebola while working in Liberia, was admitted at a Nebraska hospital on Monday.
Mukpo, 33, will be kept in a specialized containment unit at the Nebraska Medical Center that was built specifically to handle this type of illness, reported the Associated Press. He is the fifth American with Ebola to return to the U.S. for treatment during the latest outbreak, which the World Health Organization estimates has killed more than 3,400 people.
Meanwhile, a Liberian man with Ebola, Thomas Eric Duncan, who started showing symptoms while visiting the U.S. is in critical condition at a Dallas hospital.
According to the report, doctors at the Nebraska isolation unit – the largest of four in the U.S. – will evaluate Mukpo before determining how to treat him. They said they will apply the lessons learned while treating American aid worker Rick Sacra, who was allowed to return home to Massachusetts after three weeks, on September 25. Sacra received an experimental drug called TKM-Ebola, as well as two blood transfusions from another American aid worker who recovered from Ebola at an Atlanta hospital. The transfusions are believed to help a patient fight off the virus because the survivor’s blood carries antibodies for the disease.
Mukpo is the son of a renowned Tibetan monk responsible for bringing Buddhism to the West in the 1970s, reported the Daily Mail. His mother is an English aristocrat who was seduced at age 15 by the guru and married him at 16.
When Ashoka Mukpo was just 8 months old, his father – Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche – announced that the boy was a ‘tulku’ – the reincarnation of a Tibetan Buddhist Lama. Mukpo later traveled to Tibet, where he was enthroned and honored as the ninth reincarnation of Khamnyon Rinpoche, ‘the Mad Yogi of Kham.’
Trungpa, who is considered his father, is not his biological dad. His biological father is actually Mitchell Levy – a Jewish doctor from New York who was Trungpa’s personal physician – whom his mother Lady Diana Mukpo was sleeping with at the time, said the report.
After his father Trungpa died in 1987, his mother married his biological father, Dr Levy and moved to quiet suburban Providence, Rhode Island.
Mukpo remains a Buddhist. “I don’t think my role is to be a teacher and to be wearing the robes and to be up on a throne. And if that makes me failed tulku, then maybe that’s just my karma,” he said in the 2009 documentary Tulku produced by his half-brother. “’I still think I can be of some kind of benefit to somebody. And that’s what being a Buddhist, I think, is about.”
According to the Mail, Mukpo’s father was a hard-drinking, womanizing Buddhist luminary who founded the first Buddhist monastery in the West and taught the likes of Davie Bowie, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Joni Mitchell in the 1960s and 70s.
“Chögyam Trungpa was known for his wild, hedonistic Tantric parties that were fueled by drugs, booze and sex. He frequently seduced and slept with his students – claiming that it would help them on their path to enlightenment. He died at age 48 in 1987 from complications from extreme alcoholism after founding the Kagyu Samye Ling Monastery in Galloway, Scotland, and the Shambhala Mountain Center outside Boulder, Colorado,” said the report.
His mother is Lady Diana Judith Mukpo, born Diana Pybus, the daughter of a wealthy London lawyer. She attended Benenden School, an all-girl’s boarding school in Kent, England, where she is thought to have been a contemporary of Princess Anne and Baroness Manningham-Buller, former Director General of MI5.