US President Barack Obama makes his way across the South Lawn upon
return to the White House on September 12, 2014 in Washington, DC.
US President Barack Obama will Tuesday seek to "turn the tide"
in the Ebola epidemic by ordering 3,000 military personnel to West
Africa and launching a major health-care training and hygiene program.
The
White House said Obama will travel to the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta to meet US health chiefs and make the
announcement, meant to spur a global effort to fight an outbreak that
has already killed 2,400 people.
The announcement comes
amid increasing alarm about the worst-ever outbreak of the disease,
which has spread through Liberia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria and the
Democratic Republic of Congo.
Most of the new US effort will be concentrated in impoverished Liberia, the most badly affected nation.
Obama
will announce that the US Africa Command will set up a headquarters in
Monrovia to act as a regional command and control centre to coordinate
US military and international relief programs.
The
effort will involve an estimated 3,000 American military personnel,
senior officials said. Many of the forces will be positioned at a
staging base to expedite the transit of equipment and personnel.
500 HEALTH WORKERS
US
advisors will also train up to 500 health-care providers per week in
Liberia, in a bid to improve the direct medical care and the crippled
health infrastructure in the country.
In addition,
Washington will send 65 public health service corps to Liberia to manage
and staff a previously announced US military hospital to care for
health workers who become sick with Ebola.
The United
States will also, working in partnership with the United Nations
Children's Fund, immediately send Ebola-prevention kits, including
disinfectant and advice to 400,000 of the most vulnerable families in
Liberia.
"What is clear is in order to combat and
contain the outbreak at its source, we need to partner and lead an
international response," said one senior US official, on condition of
anonymity.
The official said the Obama administration
believes its latest emergency action could help "turn the tide" and slow
the spread of the epidemic.
The White House, however,
still believes that there is no realistic threat to the United States
from the Ebola epidemic. It considers that any cases that do materialize
on the US mainland among travellers would be quickly isolated.
The
United States has so far spent $100 million on fighting the Ebola
epidemic and the US Agency for International Development plans to
allocate another $75 million to increase the number of Ebola treatment
units and protective gear for health providers.
In
addition, the administration has asked Congress for a further $88
million to fund the fight against Ebola in the coming months.
The
money is contained in a short-term bill to fund the government until
mid-December which could pass Congress as soon as this week.
FIELD HOSPITAL
More
than 100 CDC workers are already at work in West Africa, and many more
staff are coordinating their work at the agency's Atlanta headquarters.
It
was unclear how many of the new US government personnel being sent to
West Africa would be deployed in direct contact with patients. The
number, however, appears limited.
Obama first said last
week that he was going to use a major military deployment to step up US
efforts to fight the Ebola epidemic.
His remarks, and a
recent YouTube message from the president offering guidance to the
people of Africa on halting infections, highlight increasing White House
concern about the national security and humanitarian implications of
the rapid spread of the disease.
The Pentagon had already announced it would send a 25-bed field hospital to Liberia.
The new effort will also see the United States construct 17 Ebola treatment centres with 100 beds in each.
Officials
said, meanwhile, that the effort to train 500 health workers per week
to meet the shortage in demand in affected nations would go on for at
least six months.
The US effort is intended to control
the epidemic at its source in West Africa, blunt the social and economic
cost of the disease and to repair regional health infrastructure.
