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Obama to announce Ebola force of 3,000 US military personnel
Contingent being sent to west Africa will train health workers, build treatment centres and deliver resources to tackle epidemic

Associated Press in Washington
theguardian.com, Tuesday 16 September 2014 00.31 EDT


The Obama administration is ramping up its response to west Africa’s Ebola crisis, preparing to assign 3,000 US military personnel to the afflicted region to supply medical and logistical support to overwhelmed local healthcare systems and to boost the number of beds needed to isolate and treat victims of the epidemic.

Barack Obama is to announce the stepped-up effort on Tuesday during a visit to the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta amid alarm that the outbreak could spread and the deadly virus could mutate into a more easily transmitted disease.

There have been appeals from the region and from aid organisations for a heightened US role in dealing with the outbreak, blamed for more than 2,200 deaths.

Administration officials said on Monday that the new initiatives aimed to train as many as 500 healthcare workers a week; erect 17 healthcare facilities in the region of 100 beds each; set up a joint command headquartered in Monrovia, Liberia, to co-ordinate between US and international relief efforts; provide home healthcare kits to hundreds of thousands of households, including 50,000 that the US Agency for International Development will deliver to Liberia this week; and carry out a home and community-based campaign to train local populations on how to handle exposed patients.

The US effort will include medics and other personnel for treatment and training, engineers to help erect the treatment facilities and specialists in logistics to assist in patient transportation.

Officials said the cost of the effort would come from $500m in overseas contingency operations, such as the war in Afghanistan, that the Pentagon already had asked Congress to redirect to carry out humanitarian efforts in Iraq and west Africa.

The officials said it would take about two weeks to get US forces on the ground.

Democratic Senator Chris Coons, chairman of the Senate foreign relations African affairs subcommittee, said: “This humanitarian intervention should serve as a firewall against a global security crisis that has the potential to reach American soil.”

Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea have been hardest hit by the outbreak, which has also reached Nigeria and Senegal.

Obama’s trip to the CDC comes a day after the United States also demanded a stepped-up international response to the outbreak. The US ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, on Monday called for an emergency meeting of the UN security council on Thursday, warning that the potential risk of the virus could “set the countries of west Africa back a generation”.

Power said the meeting on Thursday would mark a rare occasion when the security council, which is responsible for threats to international peace and security, addressed a public health crisis.

The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, is expected to brief the council along with the World Health Organisation chief Dr Margaret Chan and Dr David Nabarro, the recently named UN co-ordinator for the disease, as well as representatives from the affected countries.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest, responding to criticism that the US needed a more forceful response to the outbreak, said on Monday that Obama had identified the outbreak “as a top national security priority”, worried that it could contribute to political instability in the region and that the virus could transform and become more contagious.

He said the administration responded “pretty aggressively” when the outbreak was first reported in March. “Since that time our assistance has steadily been ramping up,” he said.

The Senate on Tuesday will hold a hearing to examine the US response. An American missionary doctor who survived the disease is among those scheduled to testify.

Four Americans have been or are being treated for Ebola in the US after evacuation from Africa.

The US has spent more than $100m responding to the outbreak and has offered to operate treatment centres for patients.