The Pentagon has no plans to scale back its response to the Ebola outbreak, Defense Department spokesman Rear Adm. John Kirby said Tuesday.
The rate of new Ebola infections in Liberia has dropped sharply in the past several weeks, according to the World Health Organization, prompting questions as to whether the U.S. military needs to follow through on plans to build 17 medical treatment facilities in that country.
But despite the decline in cases, Kirby told reporters in a Pentagon news conference that DoD will proceed to build the 100-bed facilities unless told otherwise.
Kirby said the recent decline in the number of cases is “promising, but no one is taking that for granted. The history of the disease is the numbers fluctuate.”
U.S. forces deployed to West Africa at the request of the U.S. Agency for International Development to provide logistics support, engineering and construction services.
Since September, U.S. troops have established command and control in the region, bolstered port operations in Senegal to increase the flow of medical supplies and goods to affected countries in West Africa, improved roads and built a 25-bed hospital in Monrovia, Liberia, for infected health care workers.
That hospital is not yet operational, however, because it is waiting for U.S. Public Health Service clinicians to staff it, Kirby said.
While the number of cases has dropped in heavily-hit Liberia, cases have been on the rise in the past several weeks in Sierra Leone, with local officials saying that at least 20 people are dying each day from the virus.
According to the World Health Organization, 13,567 cases of Ebola have been seen in eight countries in the outbreak, which began in late 2012. So far, there have been 4,951 deaths.
