By Jeff Mason
ATLANTA (Reuters) - U.S. lawmakers called for a government-funded "war" to contain West Africa's deadly Ebola epidemic before it threatens more countries, building on an American pledge to send 3,000 military engineers and medical personnel to combat the virus.
"Here's the hard truth. In West Africa, Ebola is now an epidemic, the likes" of which have not been seen before, President Barack Obama said during a meeting with top U.S. public health officials.
"It's spiraling out of control, it's getting worse," he said at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), where he flew to outline the plan to deploy 3,000 troops to West Africa.
The deployment represented a ramping-up in the Obama administration's response to the worst Ebola outbreak on record. It comes after repeated calls for governments to step in and help West African countries whose healthcare systems have been overwhelmed by the epidemic.
Republican and Democratic lawmakers said further measures should be considered in the coming weeks.
"We need to declare a war on Ebola," Senator Jerry Moran, a Kansas Republican, said during a congressional hearing on the U.S. response to the outbreak.
Senator Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican, said the country should view the threat of Ebola "as seriously as we take ISIS," referring to the Islamic State militant group in Syria and Iraq.
Acknowledging that the epidemic represented a national security crisis, U.S. administration officials said the focus of the military deployment would be on Liberia, where the threat of chaos is greatest. The disease has also hit hard in Sierra Leone and Guinea, and has turned up in Nigeria and Senegal.
Under the plan, engineers, medical personnel and other service members would build 17 treatment centers with 100 beds each, train thousands of healthcare workers and establish a military control center for coordinating the relief effort, U.S. officials told reporters.
Officials said the Defense Department had sought to reallocate $500 million in funds from fiscal 2014 to help cover the costs of the humanitarian mission.
The virus has killed nearly 2,500 people out of 4,985 cases in West Africa. United Nations officials said on Tuesday they would need a $1 billion response to contain the outbreak to tens of thousands of cases.
The World Health Organization has said it needs foreign medical teams with 500 to 600 experts as well as at least 10,000 local health workers. The figures may rise if the number of cases increases, as is widely expected.
"If we do not act now to stop the spread of Ebola, we could be dealing with it for years to come, affecting larger areas of Africa," Dr. Beth Bell, CDC director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, told a hearing before the Senate Committees on Appropriations and Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.
TURNING AWAY THE SICK
The Obama administration has requested an additional $88 million from Congress to fight Ebola, including $58 million to speed production of Mapp Biopharmaceutical Inc's experimental antiviral drug ZMapp and two Ebola vaccine candidates.
Liberia, founded by descendants of freed American slaves, appealed for U.S. help last week as the outbreak in the country ran unchecked.
One U.N. official in the country has said her colleagues had resorted to telling locals to use plastic bags to fend off the killer virus, due to a lack of other protective equipment.
Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), the international charity that has been leading the fight against Ebola, said it was overwhelmed and repeated its call for an immediate, massive deployment.
"We are honestly at a loss as to how a single, private NGO is providing the bulk of isolation units and beds," MSF's international president, Dr. Joanne Liu, said in a speech to the United Nations in Geneva, using the acronym for "non-governmental organization."
She said the charity has been turning away sick people in Monrovia, Liberia's capital.
U.S. officials stressed that it was very unlikely the Ebola crisis could come to the United States. Measures were being taken to screen passengers flying out of the region, they said, and protocols were in place to isolate and treat anyone who arrived in the United States showing symptoms of the disease.
The U.S. effort in West Africa will also focus on training. A site will be established where military medical personnel will teach healthcare workers how to care for Ebola patients, at a rate of 500 workers per week for six months or longer, officials said.
The U.S. Agency for International Development will support a program to distribute home protection kits with sanitizers and medical supplies to 400,000 households in Liberia.
(Additional reporting by Tom Miles in Geneva, Sharon Begley in New York and Susan Heavey in Washington; Writing by Michele Gershberg; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)