I simply cannot find any information on the US Army helping in the 1967 outbreak in the Congo. I’m not saying it doesn’t exist. I’m saying I can’t find it. Send a link if you have it.
In any case, I did find that outbreak was confined to a small area (one village), that it was solved by a combination of quarantine and no longer using hypodermic needles more than once. My failure to find a major US military deployment suggests US military involvement was limited in numbers.
That is why I post words like "this one is bigger and we have a bigger footprint."
I'm not going to research what the Army was doing in 1976, if they weren't involved as Army Colonel James Cummings, a doctor and director of the Global Emerging Infections Surveillance and Response System in the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center says they were, then you will have to find that information yourself.
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Here is some general information. All excerpts not my words.
“DoD personnel bring a level of excellence second to none, working in response to host nations and WHO in the most-affected countries of Sierra Leone and Liberia,” Army Col. James Cummings, a physician and director of the Global Emerging Infections Surveillance and Response System at the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center told AFPS.
Filoviruses like Ebola have been of interest to the Pentagon since the late 1970s, mainly because Ebola and its fellow viruses have high mortality rates — in the current outbreak, roughly 60 percent to 72 percent of those who have contracted the disease have died — and its stable nature in aerosol make it attractive as a potential biological weapon. Since the late 1970s and early 1980s, researchers at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases have sought to develop a vaccine or treatment for the disease.
Last year, USAMRIID scientists used a treatment, MB-003, on primates infected with Ebola after they became symptomatic; the treatment fully protected the animals when given one hour after exposure.
Two-thirds of infected primates were protected when treated 48 hours after exposure, according to a report published last August in Science Translational Medicine.
In March, the Food and Drug Administration granted fast-track status to the development of another Ebola treatment, TKM-Ebola, developed under a $140 million contract with DoD, although earlier this month, the FDA placed a human clinical study of TKM-Ebola on hold, requesting more information on the protocol before allowing it to proceed.
And last year, DoD awarded a $4.4 million grant to the Vanderbilt Vaccine Center at Vanderbilt University to study vaccine development and treatment for Ebola and another filovirus, Marburg.
Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs Dr. Jonathan Woodson said Friday that global health is a national security issue and the Pentagon plays a major role in preventing and responding to security threats from health catastrophes.
Woodson said DoD remains broadly engaged in international public health matters.
“One of the things I don’t think many people realize is what a huge valuable asset the military health system is to this nation,” he said Friday in a television interview on “Defense News with Vago Muradian.”
“Not only are we a key enabler so that service members, men and women who ... go in harm’s way will be taken care of, but we are a public health system, an education system, a research and development system,” Woodson said.
“The recent development with infectious disease issues in Africa — they are turning to the U.S. military to provide expertise.”