Sept. 16, 2014 -- The U.S. Department of Defense will send up to 3,000 personnel to Liberia in the coming weeks in an effort to boost the international response to the outbreak of Ebola in West Africa, which has claimed thousands of lives and shows no signs of slowing.
The mission, which will be called “Operation United Assistance,” will be based in Monrovia, the Liberian capital. There, the military will set up a staging base and joint-force command center, which will serve as a “backbone” to stabilize the region and hopefully encourage more involvement by other countries, a senior Obama administration official told reporters Monday night.
The military also plans to send engineers to build another 17 units to treat people with Ebola. Each unit will have 100 beds, significantly increasing the space that is available to isolate patients in the region.
The military will also begin courses to train as many as 500 new health care workers each week. The training will be done by doctors and nurses in the military, officials said.
Costs of the operation will be covered by a $500 million “reprogramming” of funds within the Department of Defense budget. What's more, President Barack Obama has asked Congress to approve an additional $88 million to support a package of efforts to contain the outbreak in West Africa. The infusion of new money is on top of $175 million already committed to the fight, officials said.
“We believe that these efforts, taken in total… will turn the tide from a high-transmission epidemic that continues to grow every single day to one where the epidemic curve is bent and we start to see, over many months, a significant reduction in cases and deaths,” said one official, speaking ahead of Obama’s official announcement of the efforts at the CDC in Atlanta today.
The new strategy targets the spread of the infection on several fronts, officials said.
Many sick patients in West Africa have chosen to stay home rather than go to understaffed hospital wards. Those people, who are often cared for by family members, are believed to be a big factor in the continuing spread of the disease.
To support families caring for loved ones with Ebola, health workers will distribute 400,000 infection-control kits to homes in the hardest hit areas. These kits will contain disinfectants and medications to help ease symptoms, officials said. They'll also have information about how the disease is spread and ways that families can more easily contact ambulance services to get their loved ones to hospitals for care.
U.S. workers are also training burial teams and will distribute thousands of additional personal-protective equipment suits to help protect people who are working to stem the outbreak.
source : U.S. to Lead International Effort to Stop Ebola
