The United States will ramp up its response to the Ebola crisis in West Africa with plans to build 17 treatment centres, train thousands of healthcare workers and establish a military control centre for coordination with 3,000 military forces, US officials have said.
The plan will be unveiled by US president Barack Obama today, senior administration officials told reporters.
Mr Obama, who has called the epidemic a national security crisis, has faced criticism for not doing more to stem the outbreak, which the World Health Organization (WHO) said last week had killed more than 2,400 people out of 4,784 cases in West Africa.
The president will visit the US Centres for Disease Control in Atlanta today to show his commitment. The stepped-up effort he will announce is to include 3,000 military forces and a joint forces command centre in Monrovia, capital of Liberia, to coordinate efforts with the US government and other international partners.
The plan will “ensure that the entire international response effort is more effective and helps to scale up to turn the tide in this crisis,” a senior administration official told reporters yesterday, ahead of the president’s trip.
“The significant expansion that the president will detail ... really represents a set of areas where the US military will bring unique capabilities that we believe will improve the effectiveness of the entire global response,” he said.
The treatment centres will have 100 beds each and be built as soon as possible, an official said. A site will be established where military medical personnel will teach some 500 healthcare workers per week for six months or more how to provide care to Ebola patients, officials said.
The WHO estimates that the hardest-hit countries - Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone - need at least three to four times the number of medical and public health workers currently on the ground, or another 600 doctors to care for patients and 1,000 workers to track their contacts.
Mr Obama’s administration has requested an additional $88 million (€68 million) from Congress to fight Ebola, including $58 million (€45 million) to speed production of the Snap experimental antiviral drug and two Ebola vaccine candidates.
Officials said the Department of Defence had requested to reallocate $500 million (€387 million) in funds from fiscal 2014 to help cover the costs of the humanitarian mission.
The US Agency for International Development (USAID) will also support a program to distribute protection kits with sanitisers and medical supplies to 400,000 vulnerable households in Liberia.
Reuters