Australia Urged to Send Medical Personnel to Fight Ebola

The international medical humanitarian organisation Médecins Sans Frontières is urging Australia to send trained emergency medical personnel to fight Ebola in West Africa.
“The situation on the ground is catastrophic. The Ebola outbreak is killing thousands of people. The infection rate doubles every three weeks. With some 6000 people infected to date, and many thousands uncounted, if immediate action is not taken now to stop the spread there could be hundreds of thousands infected by the New Year, of which more than half will die,” Médecins sans Frontières Australia’s Executive Director, Paul McPhun, said.
“As a member of the UN Security Council Australia voted ten days ago for a resolution calling on all UN member States to mobilise resources and expertise to West Africa, and yet is not responding with the kind of action the resolution explicitly calls for,” McPhun said.
Australian deployment of even a small number of trained staff would have a very significant impact. Even a dozen trained staff who could oversee local teams to manage an isolation centre, help case finding and outbreak control measures would save thousands of lives today.
Every day, issues such as medical evacuation become clearer, as commitments are made by UN member States in Europe to facilitate the needs of those responding to the Ebola crisis. This emergency is unique, and clearly challenging, but it can be managed with a strong coordinated effort from the international community.  
“Médecins Sans Frontières simply does not have the capacity to do this job alone. We are already turning people away from our clinics which have been stretched beyond over capacity for weeks.   It has taken months to reach an international consensus on the need to act now, and yet still the acute urgency to mobilise support to West Africa before it is too late seems to have little momentum here,” McPhun added.
Medicins Sans Frontieres began its Ebola intervention efforts in West Africa in March this year and now operates in Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, Senegal and Sierra Leone. The organisation runs six Ebola case management centres with a capacity of 579 beds. More than 250 international staff have been deployed to the region.