South Korea plans to dispatch a third batch of medical staff to Sierra Leone this month for a four-week mission to join the global fight against the Ebola outbreak, the Foreign Ministry said Monday.
The team, comprised of two army doctors and three nurses, will leave for the U.K. on Saturday for a weeklong training course before heading to the West African country later this month. They are scheduled to receive three days of related education at home until Wednesday.
“With Freetown seeking to stamp out its last case by March 1, our third team will be able to stay on until the epidemic stabilizes later that month,” a senior ministry official told reporters on customary condition of anonymity.
Korea’s second group of nine personnel has been serving since Jan. 26 at a 100-bed treatment center in Goderich in the suburbs of capital Freetown, which was built by the British government and is operated by Emergency, an Italy-based relief organization. The 10-strong first batch will complete its mandatory 21-day quarantine program on Feb. 20.
The scale of the workforce was reduced in line with the continuous drop in new confirmed cases, which prompted the NGO to request a downsizing, the official said.
As of the third week of January, the Sierra Leone government reported 65 newly confirmed patients, a more than 80 percent fall from 357 three weeks earlier.
The outbreak is believed to have killed at least 8,000 people worldwide since last March.
To facilitate the work of the international staff at Goderich, Seoul has also provided five tablet computers and two electronic stethoscopes made in Korea, the official said. Officials from the foreign, defense and health ministries plan to depart for Sierra Leone on Feb. 11 to support the medical workers and wrap up their months-long activities.
“Now we need to think about how to capitalize on the results and experiences that our emergency relief team will have made,” the official added.
“For humanitarian aid to be sustainable, it ought to be packaged with development assistance, which could serve as a stepping-stone to reconstruction. Given the U.N. Development Program’s activities there and our joint fund, we could probably undertake various projects in partnership with the agency.”’
By Shin Hyon-hee(
heeshin@heraldcorp.com)
