CRI听力:China to Send More Medical Workers to Help Ebola Fight

The Chinese government has announced plans to send over a thousand additional medical workers and experts to West Africa in the coming months to help fight Ebola. This is the biggest overseas deployment of health workers in China's history.

CRI's Luo Laiming has the details.

China has already sent over 250-people to Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, with 134 of them still on the ground in the Ebola zone.

A new team of 12 public health trainers will leave for Sierra Leone on Sunday.

Liang Xiaofeng is the leader of the training team, also the vice director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

"We will go there as a pioneer team to learn the situation on the ground. We need to know the will of the local people. We will provide them with what they need the most. Our medical staff there noticed a shortage of public health management personnel. Local religious leaders, public workers, and volunteers lack the basic knowledge and skills in preventing the epidemic."

The new staff will help provide training to some 10-thousand people in Sierra Leone. Liang adds that Chinese experience in preventing epidemic disease could be helpful.

"In these developing countries, they don't have the money to invest in the necessary hospitals and personnel. There is no way to treat the epidemic at this time, we can only depend on isolation with the help of the public health system, which is what these countries lack. The public health system in China responded well during the SARS outbreak. China has been developing a public health team since the 1970s, it helped a lot in China's public health problems. We hope to build a team like this in these affected countries through training."

China has offered four batches of aid and around 120 million U.S. dollars to West African countries.

China on Wednesday pledged another 2 million U.S. dollars to help the international fight against the Ebola epidemic in West Africa.

Ian Smith is the executive director of the director-general's office at the World Health Organization.

"We are much more optimistic now about that level of support than we were in the past. And this is again, a very good example of how in solidarity with the affected countries, governments, the government of China is stepping forward to provide support."

As of the end of October, the WHO had declared over 13,000 confirmed, probable and suspected cases, and around 5000 deaths.

China's deployment of more medical staff to the affected countries adds to the trend of world help as more people are realizing that the world need to work together to contain the deadly epidemic disease.

For CRI, I'm Luo Laiming.