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.
The Ebola virus has no known cure and up to a 90 percent
fatality rate. Only supportive care can be offered to patients
diagnosed with the disease while researchers work to find a
vaccine. Defense researchers think the viral disease originated in
rural populations that eat meat from Ebola-carrying gorillas and
monkeys.
The virus is passed among animals or people through body fluids.
Only a person who is infected and is showing signs of illness can
pass the disease to others. Health care workers and home caretakers
who have direct patient contact and those who prepare bodies for
burial are especially at risk, the infectious disease doctor
said.
“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.”
(2014-08-13 09:23:31) 
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