So how are a few thousand Americans going to make a difference? The American military is not trained for this mission. We have CDC to perform this function. And where is the rest of the world? This is a grandstanding ploy by Obama.
The Army is expert in things like this and always helps with it’s experts and science, but we are already doing that and have done it in every Ebola outbreak going back to the first one in 1976, but that doesn’t mean regular troops, and by the thousands.
“Defense Department personnel are on the ground in West Africa and in U.S. laboratories fighting to control the worst outbreak in the African history of the Ebola virus, which a senior Army infectious disease doctor called a “scourge of mankind.”
Army Colonel James Cummings, a doctor and director of the Global Emerging Infections Surveillance and Response System in the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center, said the battle against the virus since the outbreak began in West Africa in March focuses on trying to stop disease transmission.
“We had a large footprint in Africa,” Cummings said of the Defense Department’s response to the first Ebola cases reported in 1976 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly Zaire. Since that time, the Defense Department has answered numerous calls for assistance from the World Health Organization (WHO), nongovernmental organizations and ministries of heath and defense, he said.
Defense personnel provide a wide array of support to the Ebola-stricken African nations, from logistical help to guides for clinical management of the virus, Cummings said, adding the U.S service members “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.”
While little known, this is something the Army specializes in, but not with thousands of line troops.
“The U.S. military, and in particular, the Army, has had a longstanding mission in preventing and treating infectious and parasitic diseases in troops, dating to the late 1800s.
The Armed Forces Press Service reported late Friday that military health workers, including an entomologist from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, already are in the affected area providing support ranging from logistical assistance to “clinical management” — assisting in treating affected populations.
“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.”