In an appearance at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Obama will announce the stepped-up offensive against the Ebola outbreak, which has killed more than 2,200 people in five West African countries.
The U.S. would help to provide medical and logistical support to overwhelmed local health care systems and to boost the number of beds needed to isolate and treat those infected.
The new initiatives include training as many as 500 health care workers a week; erecting 17 heath care facilities with approximately 100 beds each; setting up a joint command headquartered in Monrovia, Liberia, to coordinate between U.S. and international relief efforts; providing 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 carrying out a home- and community-based campaign to train local populations on how to handle exposed patients.
US partly considers the fight against Ebola a national security issue because the disease threatens fragile governments in Africa and could lead to more safe havens for terrorists. The request falls under the jurisdiction of the Pentagon because the military has the capacity to set up quarantine camps.
According to a source quoted by Associated Press, it would take about two weeks for U.S. forces to get on the ground. The U.S. effort will include medics and corpsmen for treatment and training, engineers to help erect the treatment facilities and specialists in logistics to assist in patient transportation.
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