When President Barack Obama spoke about the US military helping fight the Ebola epidemic on Meet the Press NBC News this past Sunday, Tim Flanigan, an American clinician working in Monrovia, said he was "ecstatic". It was exactly what most people who run the Ebola efforts in Liberia, the hardest hit country, had hoped. But joy turned to dismay the next day when Flanigan has learned the details of the Pentagon's plans.
Obama promised "to get military US assets just to set up, for example, isolation units and equipment there to ensure security for the public health workers outbreak everywhere. "on Monday, a representative of the Pentagon said the army planned to send only field hospital with 25 beds for $ 22 million in Monrovia, Liberia's capital." He will not make a dent in the treatment of Ebola for the people of Liberia, "Flanigan warns." It is such a small number of beds and they can thus be directed to non-Liberians. "
Flanigan, who works at Brown University 1999-2012 and headed the Division of Infectious Diseases, he arrived in Monrovia on September 1 and plans to stay for two months. A Catholic deacon, he also works with faith-based groups focused on health and blogging about his experience.
Flanigan said Liberia and officials and international workers, he spoke with the US military had planned to set up field hospitals that have the ability to help up to 400 people. there is a great shortage of beds for patients with Ebola in the nation, and standard care is the same shortage for people who are admitted to what is called Ebola treatment units. News that just one small facility would come was disheartening, he said, given the expectations.
"the US military has the capacity and know -How and training and infectious disease experts are incomparable to come and establish an Ebola treatment unit that would be able to take care of a large number of patients, "he insists.
for the US military, it is "a top priority" for the "deployable field hospital" in Monrovia and "we expect to get there quickly," wrote Navy Cmdr. Amy Derrick-Frost, a spokesman for the US Department of Defense (DOD), in an e-mail to Science Insider. The Army is also working with partner agencies, including centers for the US Agency for International Development- Disease Control and "to assess the situation in affected areas to determine what other needs and necessary or required resources "Derrick-Frost wrote.
A deployable field hospital can be moved on pallets by air and quickly implemented, which plans to do before replacing the Liberian government DOD. "The purpose of this piece of equipment is to provide an installation that health workers in the affected area can use for themselves if they become sick or injured," writes Derrick-Frost.
Flanigan said a US military stronger response could help solve another problem coming the health care system badly fractured Liberia can not answer. There is a pressure to treat patients Ebola with the blood of people who survive disease and perhaps give people infected untested medicines, as well as a separate effort that can offer experimental Ebola vaccine to health workers and other first responders. But hospitals and clinics are not not currently the ability to collect blood samples and tissue necessary to study the impact of these interventions, Flanigan said. "we will not learn what we desperately need to know about the treatment and prevention of this disease" he said. "It is not in the best interest of the Liberian people, West Africa, or the Americans."
* Ebola files: Given the current Ebola epidemic, unprecedented in terms of the number of people killed and rapid geographic spread, science and science Translational Medicine made a collection of research articles and news on the viral disease available for researchers and the general public.
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