U.S. sets troops for Ebola battle

3,000 to join W. Africa relief

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

President Barack Obama will meet with researchers today at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta as the U.S. is "steadily ramping up" its response, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Monday. Obama has labeled the outbreak a national security priority but has downplayed the risk of it spreading to the U.S.

The U.S. also called an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council for Thursday, saying the situation in West Africa is "dire" and getting worse every day.

Administration officials said Monday that the new initiatives aim to train as many as 500 health care workers a week; erect 17 heath care facilities in the region of 100 beds each; provide home health care kits to hundreds of thousands of households, including 50,000 that the U.S. 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.

U.S. ambassador Samantha Power said the U.S. has asked the United Nations' 193 member states to arrive at the meeting with "concrete commitments" to tackle the outbreak, especially in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, the countries hit hardest by the disease.

"The trendlines in this crisis are grave, and without immediate international action we are facing the potential for a public health crisis that could claim lives on a scale far greater than current estimates and set the countries of West Africa back a generation," Power said Monday. "This is a perilous crisis but one we can contain if the international community comes together to meet it head on."

The virus has killed more than 2,400 people in four West African countries since December, and the U.S. is concerned it may leave political instability in its wake, Earnest said.

"The other concern," he said, is that "the more this virus is spread from person to person, the more likely it is that the virus could mutate in a way that makes it even more dangerous."

Obama has asked Congress for $88 million for efforts to fight Ebola. Of that money, $58 million is for the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority to develop Ebola vaccines for clinical trials, and $30 million is for CDC efforts in Africa.

The Defense and Health and Human Services departments are among the agencies being mobilized, the State Department said last week.

The Pentagon has asked Congress to transfer $500 million for USAID and the CDC, in part for Ebola assistance, according to a Sept. 8 document signed by Comptroller Mike McCord. That's in addition to $109 million requested for U.S. Africa Command and Central Command to provide assistance against the disease, according to the document.

"Right now, the risk of an Ebola outbreak in the United States is very low, but that risk would only increase if there were not a robust response on the part of the United States," Earnest said.

Earnest said the U.S. has "unique capabilities" to assist the African nations and international aid groups.

Obama will discuss additional steps the U.S. is taking when he visits the CDC, Earnest said.

The Senate Appropriations Committee plans to hold a hearing today about Ebola with testimony from Anthony Fauci, the National Institutes of Health head of infectious diseases, and Kent Brantley, a U.S. doctor who contracted Ebola in Liberia.

The outbreak of the viral disease is the worst on record, and the World Health Organization warned that the epidemic may not have peaked yet. Ebola is spread through direct contact with the bodily fluids of sick patients, making doctors and nurses especially vulnerable to contracting the virus that has no vaccine or approved treatment.

In Sierra Leone, officials on Monday accused the WHO of being "sluggish" in facilitating an evacuation of a doctor who died of Ebola before she could be sent out of the country for medical care.

Dr. Olivet Buck died Saturday, hours after the U.N. health agency said it could not help evacuate her to Germany.

Buck is the fourth Sierra Leonean doctor to die in the outbreak.

At a news conference Monday, a Sierra Leonean government official read a government statement that said Buck is the second doctor from that country to die because negotiations on evacuation had dragged on. Dr. Sheik Humarr Khan, the country's top Ebola expert, was being considered for evacuation when he died of the disease in July.

Information for this article was contributed by Angela Greiling Keane, Michelle Jamrisko, Tony Capaccio and Erik Wasson of Bloomberg News and by Clarence Roy-Macaulay, Edith M. Lederer, Sarah DiLorenzo and Jim Kuhnhenn of The Associated Press.

A Section on 09/16/2014

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