Citing security threat, Obama expands U.S. role fighting Ebola | Reuters

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http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/16/us-health-ebola-obama-idUSKBN0HB08S20140916

Citing security threat, Obama expands U.S. role fighting Ebola

(Reuters) - President Barack Obama on Tuesday called West Africa's deadly Ebola outbreak a looming threat to global security and announced a major expansion of the U.S. role in trying to halt its spread, including deployment of 3,000 troops to the region.

"The reality is that this epidemic is going to get worse before it gets better," Obama said at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Atlanta headquarters.

"But right now, the world still has an opportunity to save countless lives. Right now, the world has the responsibility to act, to step up and to do more. The United States of America intends to do more," Obama added.

The U.S. plan, a dramatic expansion of Washington's initial response last week, won praise from the U.N. World Health Organization, aid workers and officials in West Africa. But health experts said it was still not enough to contain the epidemic, which is quickly growing and has caused local healthcare systems to buckle under the strain of fighting it.

U.S. officials said the focus of the military deployment would be Liberia, a nation founded by freed American slaves that is the hardest hit of the countries affected by the crisis.

Obama's plan calls for sending 3,000 troops, including engineers and medical personnel; establishing a regional command and control center in Liberia's capital, Monrovia; building 17 treatment centers with 100 beds each; training thousands of healthcare workers - up to 500 per week for six months or longer; and establishing a military control center for coordinating the relief effort.

"We have to act fast. We can't dawdle on this one," Obama said.

The White House said the troops will not be responsible for direct patient care. Obama also said the "chances of an Ebola outbreak here in the United States are extremely low."

The worst Ebola outbreak since the disease was identified in 1976 has already killed nearly 2,500 people and is threatening to spread elsewhere in Africa.

GLOBAL SECURITY

Obama said that if the outbreak is not stopped now, hundreds of thousands of people may become infected, "with profound political and economic and security implications for all of us."

"This is an epidemic that is not just a threat to regional security. It’s a potential threat to global security, if these countries break down, if their economies break down, if people panic. That has profound effects on all of us, even if we are not directly contracting the disease," Obama added.

The WHO praised the U.S. plan for providing support to the United Nations and other international partners to help authorities in Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Senegal contain the outbreak.

"This massive ramp-up of support from the United States is precisely the kind of transformational change we need to get a grip on the outbreak and begin to turn it around," Dr. Margaret Chan, WHO's director-general, said in a statement.

Earlier, a senior WHO official said the Ebola outbreak requires a much faster response to limit its spread to tens of thousands of cases.

"We don't know where the numbers are going on this," WHO Assistant Director-General Bruce Aylward told a news conference in Geneva, calling the crisis "unparalleled in modern times."

Obama's announcement marks his second within a week of a new mission for the U.S. military, following last week's speech outlining a broad escalation of the campaign against the Islamic State militant group in Iraq and Syria.

'WELCOME NEWS'

Liberians hailed the word that U.S. troops were coming, recalling a military operation in 2003 that helped stabilize the country during a civil war.

"This is welcome news. This is what we expected from the U.S. a long time ago," Anthony Mulbah, a student at the University of Monrovia, said in the dilapidated oceanfront capital. "The U.S. remains a strong partner to Liberia."

In Liberia, a shortage of space in clinics for isolating victims means patients are being turned away, then infecting others.

The initial U.S. response last week had focused on providing funding and supplies, drawing criticism from aid workers for not deploying manpower as in other disasters like earthquakes.

Ebola spreads rapidly, causes fever and uncontrolled bleeding. The latest outbreak has killed more than half its victims. Its impact has been greatest in Liberia and neighboring Guinea and Sierra Leone.

The virus has so far killed 2,461 people, half of the 4,985 people infected, and the death toll has doubled in the past month, WHO's Aylward said.

The outbreak was first confirmed in the remote forests of southeastern Guinea in March, then spread across Sierra Leone and Liberia. A handful of Ebola deaths have been recorded in Nigeria, Africa's most populous country.

The disease has crippled weak health systems, infecting hundreds of local staff in a region chronically short of doctors. The WHO has said that 500 to 600 more foreign experts and at least 10,000 more local health workers are needed.

"It is not enough to provide protective clothing when you don't have the people who will wear them," Ghana's President John Dramani Mahama said during a visit to Sierra Leone.

The U.S. deployment revives memories of Liberia's war years, when Monrovians piled bodies of the dead at the U.S. embassy to persuade Washington to send troops. In 2003, a U.S. mission helped African forces stabilize Liberia after 14 years of war, in which some 250,000 people are thought to have died.

Liberia's President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who wrote to Obama last week to plead for direct U.S. intervention, was due to address her country on Wednesday.

The U.S. intervention comes as the pace of cash and emergency supplies dispatched to the region accelerates.

Washington has sent about 100 health officials and committed some $175 million in aid so far. Other nations, including Cuba, China, France and Britain; have pledged medical workers, health centers and other forms of support.

Critics, including regional leaders, former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Peter Piot, one of the scientists who discovered Ebola in 1976; have said international efforts have so far fallen woefully short.

"It is now up to other governments to equally scale up their support in Sierra Leone and Guinea," Piot, now director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told Reuters.

Many neighboring African countries have closed their borders and canceled flights to affected countries, making the humanitarian response more difficult.

A draft U.N. Security Council resolution on Ebola, obtained by Reuters, calls on U.N. member states, particularly in the region, to lift general travel and border restrictions." The resolution could win approval later this week.

In a speech to the United Nations, the president of medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), which has some 2,000 staff members fighting the disease in the region, said other countries need to follow the U.S. lead.

(Additional reporting by Tom Miles and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva, Umaru Fofana in Freetown, Alphonso Toweh, David Lewis in Dakar, Sharon Begley in New York and Roberta Rampton and Susan Heavey in Washington; Writing by Will Dunham; Editing by Daniel Flynn, Peter Graff and Jonathan Oatis)