AlQa'dah 14, 1435, September 09, 2014, SPA -- The U.S. military will send a field hospital to Liberia for medical workers fighting the Ebola virus that has killed more than 2,000 people in West Africa, the Pentagon said Monday. The move comes after President Barack Obama pledged Sunday that the U.S. military would offer logistical support to help countries facing the Ebola outbreak and amid warnings Monday the number of Ebola cases in Liberia would rise exponentially in coming weeks. "We are sending a 25-bed field-deployable hospital to Monrovia, Liberia," Colonel Steve Warren, a Pentagon spokesman, told reporters. "The intent of this piece of equipment is to provide a facility that healthcare workers in the affected region can use for themselves if they become ill or injured." The field hospital has not yet been sent to Africa, but "it is a top priority, and we expect it to get there rapidly," Warren said. The $22 million hospital was being provided at the request of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which is coordinating the U.S. response to the Ebola outbreak first identified in Guinea in March. Warren said the field hospital would be set up by U.S. personnel and handed over to Liberian authorities. There are no plans for U.S. military involvement in providing medical treatment, he said. The death toll from the Ebola epidemic, which is spreading across West Africa, has surpassed 2,100, out of nearly 4,000 people who have been infected, according to World Health Organization (WHO) data. Liberia accounts for more than half the deaths, and the U.N. health agency said Monday the country would have thousands of new cases in the next three weeks.
