By Addis Getachew
ADDIS ABABA
Some 39 volunteers drawn from numerous African countries – including doctors, epidemiologists, lab technicians, data analysts and communication officers – departed Ethiopia on Wednesday for the Ebola-hit West African nation of Guinea.
"You make us proud and do a service to humanity," African Union (AU) Commission Chairperson Ncosazana Dlamini-Zuma told volunteers at a ceremony held at the AU's Addis Ababa headquarters.
"I am grateful to the countries, to the heads of state, to their cabinets [and] to their health workers for contributing to this," she said.
"We are hoping that we can indeed send a lot more soon so that we can be able to deal with this epidemic as expeditiously as possible," she added.
The health volunteers, who were trained in the Ethiopian capital, are expected to remain in Guinea for six weeks.
It was the third group of African health volunteers to be dispatched to Ebola-affected countries in the region. The first two batches were sent to Sierra Leone and Liberia.
In recent months, Ebola – a contagious disease for which there is no known treatment or cure – has killed 4,951 people worldwide, mostly in West Africa, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
Dlamini-Zuma said she was pleased with the overall response by African countries to earlier calls for more human resources to help fight the deadly virus.
"I am very happy with the [African] response; it is a good show of solidarity," she said.
"We hope that our partners who have committed themselves to providing infrastructure, logistics and other things will also be able to provide that [i.e., continue providing it] as we send more health workers to these countries," the AU official added.
Rwandan health volunteer Dr. Landry Ndriko Mayigane, for his part, complained that healthworkers returning from Ebola-affected countries often faced stigma at home.
He urged Dlamini-Zuma to "lobby African countries against such discrimination."
The AU commission chairperson, for her part, described the stigmatization of returning health volunteers as "unacceptable."
"They [health workers] are our heroes and heroines," Dlamini-Zuma asserted.
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