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Ebola Centers in Liberia Built by US Troops Stand Empty
Monday, January 19, 2015 12:41 PM
By: John Blosser
Several of the Ebola treatment centers erected by the U.S. in Liberia stand empty today, and some have never treated a single patient.
On Sept. 16, President Obama announced that 3,000 U.S. military troops would travel to West Africa to construct 17 Ebola treatment hospitals, but before the centers could be put into use, the epidemic began to recede, The Washington Post reports.
Construction of two of the centers was canceled. Out of seven treatment centers built in Liberia's capital Monrovia, one is closed down and three have suspended operations, the Post reports.
The decision to construct the centers was made when the epidemic was raging and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in September predicted a worst case scenario of 1.4 million Ebola cases by January, New York magazine reports.
There have been 21,373 total cases of Ebola reported, and 8,483 deaths, with the vast majority in West Africa, including 3,556 in Liberia, the BBC reports.
The U.N. is continuing to build treatment centers, mostly through UNICEF, and Laurence Sailly, head of mission for Doctors Without Borders in Liberia, commented to the Post, "It just makes no sense."
The CDC's prediction, which later proved to be wildly overinflated, triggered a massive international response, which still continues.
Douglas Mercado, USAID administrator in Liberia told the Post, "With that kind of dire prediction from the CDC, and not having seen anything like this before, we had to try everything at our disposal."
Moses Massaquoi, the Liberian government head of Ebola case management, told the Post, "If they had been built when we needed them, it wouldn’t have been too much, but they were too late."
Officials bristle at the Monday morning quarterbacking, with Gen. Gary Volesky, the head U.S. military officer in Liberia, telling the Post, "A lot of people are evaluating the strategy based on what we know today, not what we knew at the time."
No one is sure what caused the outbreak suddenly to dissipate, and Volesky told the Post, "I don’t think you can point to one silver bullet that solved Ebola. My argument is it’s the whole strategy that’s showing us a positive trend."
However, officials cautioned, the Ebola crisis may be far from over.
The U.N.'s Ebola head, David Nabarro, told Fox News that, "There are still numbers of new cases that are alarming, and there are hotspots that are emerging in new places that make me believe there is still quite a lot of the disease that we're not seeing."
