WASHINGTON
U.S. President Barack Obama outlined new U.S. efforts to deal with the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, during a visit Tuesday to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
It will include sending 3,000 troops to Liberia to set up a joint force command, an immediate staging base in Senegal and additional treatment units across West Africa.
The president noted that the strategy will be aimed at controlling the outbreak, addressing its effects on local economies and communities; coordinating a broader global response, and building up a public health system in the countries under future threat.
The command will be headquartered in Monrovia to provide regional command and control support to U.S. military activities and also facilitate coordination with international relief efforts.
A staging area will be established in Sengal to more quickly distribute aid and personnel, Obama said.
He also noted that a new training site will be created to train up to 500 health care workers to effectively and safely care for more patients and additional treatment units, including new isolation area and more than 1,000 beds will be set up.
"USAID will join with international partners and local communities in a community care campaign to distribute supplies and information kits to hundreds of thousands of families so they can better protect themselves," he said.
"The world is looking to us, the United States. And it’s a responsibility that we embrace," Obama said, nothing that this effort is the largest international response in the history of the CDC.
The president also tried to ease fears of possible outbreak in the U.S.
"We’ve been taking the necessary precautions, including working with countries in West Africa to increase screening at airports so that someone with the virus doesn’t get on a plane for the United States," he said.
Obama said that Ebola is now an epidemic spiraling out of control as is spreading faster and exponentially, noting that the number of people infected can grow to tens of thousands.
"If the outbreak is not stopped now, we could be looking at hundreds of thousands of people infected with profound political and economic and security implications for all of us," Obama said. "This is an epidemic that is not just a threat to regional security, it's a potential threat to global security."
The World Health Organization has called for more medics to help combat the virus as the death toll has risen above 2,400.
Also known as the tropical fever, which first appeared in 1976 in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ebola can be transmitted to humans from wild animals.
It also spreads through contact with body fluids of infected persons or of those who have died of the disease.
www.aa.com.tr/en
