MEXICO CITY, September 26 (RIA Novosti) – Cuba is preparing to dispatch a team of 461 doctors to Africa as the death toll in the Ebola outbreak is climbing to 3,000, according to a local health official.
Regla Luz Angulo Pardo of the Cuban Health Ministry said the first team of 165 medical workers was to go to Sierra Leone in early October. A total of 15,000 Cuban medics volunteered to help contain the deadly Ebola epidemic.
Cuban medical teams will be dispatched to the three most-hit countries in West Africa, which are Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, according to Prensa Latina news agency.
Ebola virus disease is a deadly illness transmitted through direct contact with the blood or bodily fluids of the infected. Its mortality rate stands at 53 percent.
The current outbreak, worst yet, started in southern Guinea at the end of 2013 and consequently spread to Liberia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Senegal. A separate outbreak, unrelated to the one in West Africa, is taking place in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
In Guinea, a team of Russian epidemiologists, virologists and bacteriologists are working alongside international colleagues to curb the lethal pandemic.
