Elite PLA unit to help in Ebola battle
Print Edition
CHINA will send an elite unit from the People’s Liberation Army to help Ebola-hit Liberia, the foreign ministry said yesterday, responding to UN calls for a greater global effort to fight the deadly virus in West Africa.
The PLA squad, which gained experience during the 2002 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome outbreak, will build a 100-bed treatment center in Liberia, the first such facility in the three countries most affected by Ebola to be constructed and run by a foreign country, said Lin Songtian, director general of the ministry’s African affairs department.
The center will be in operation in a month’s time, he told a briefing in Beijing. China will also send 480 PLA medical staff to treat Ebola patients, he said.
It is the first time China will have deployed a whole unit of epidemic prevention forces and military medical staff abroad, Lin said.
China has so far donated 750 million yuan (US$123 million) to 13 African countries and international organizations to combat Ebola.
“China’s assistance will not stop until the Ebola epidemic is eradicated in West Africa,” Lin said.
In July, China said that more than half its foreign aid of more than US$14 billion went to Africa.
China has already sent hundreds of aid workers to Africa to combat the virus.
Sihuan Pharmaceutical Holdings Group Ltd, a Chinese drugmaker with military ties, has sent several thousand doses of an experimental Ebola drug to Africa and is planning clinical trials there.
Lin said several thousand Chinese nationals live in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone — the three states worse affected, and about a million Chinese nationals live on the African continent.
The UN called on foreign governments to ramp up efforts to help, requesting that they send hundreds more medical personnel to the three impoverished countries to help in the fight.
Foreign efforts have been complicated by public health policy issues at home.
Some US states have slapped mandatory quarantines on health workers returning from Ebola-hit states, while Australia this week imposed a blanket ban on visas from the three affected states.
Health experts have decried the measures as draconian, and say such policies may discourage foreign doctors and nurses from volunteering to help.
Medical professionals say Ebola is difficult to catch and is spread through direct contact with bodily fluids from an infected person and is not transmitted by people who show no symptoms. Ebola is not airborne.
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