Ebola health workers are TIME Person of the Year

In what appears to be the greatest recognition for medical personnel, who risked and are still caring for people infected with the Ebola Virus Disease, an American weekly newsmagazine, TIME, on Wednesday named health workers at the frontline of fighting the disease as its 2014 Person of the Year.

This followed days of anticipation of the keenly competed annual event.

“Doctors who wouldn’t quit even as their colleagues fell ill and died, nurses comforting patients while standing in slurries of mud, vomit and feaces; the Ebola fighters are the TIME Person of the Year,’’ declared Managing Editor, Nancy Gibbs.

The Ebola health workers slugged it out with 49 other people and a group of people to come out tops.

Runners up include Russian president, Vladimir Putin; acting president of the Iraqi Kurdistan region, Masoud Barzani; as well as the Chief Executive of Alibaba Group, Jack Ma.

The on-going protests across the United States over the fatal shooting of a black unarmed teenager, Michael Brown, by a white policeman, Darren Wilson, in Ferguson, Missouri, also made the list of finalists.

The protesters first took to the streets in August after a grand jury declined to press charges against Wilson.

The annual ‘Person of the Year’ title was fortuitously born in 1927 when American inventor and explorer, Charles Lindbergh, was not featured on any of TIME’s covers in the year.

The decision by the editors to feature him on the cover page, months after Lindbergh made his historic non-stop flight from New York to Paris, and calling him ‘Man of the Year’, gave birth to the 87-year-old tradition.

People, who have been previously named ‘Person of the Year’ included Pope Francis (2013); US President Barack Obama (2012); and Facebook’s co-founder, Mark Zuckerberg (2010), among others.

Deciding a person or group of person, who has made the most impact on news headlines around the world every yea,r is a constant challenge to TIME’s editors.

“The challenge is that on one hand, we are trying to make a decision about who best represents the news of the year. But the pick also needs to have archival value. You need the sense that it will stand the test of time. So, ideally, we want out Person of the Year to be a snapshot of where the world is and a picture of where it’s going,’’ said deputy managing editor, on the magazine’s website.