WASHINGTON, November 13 (RIA Novosti) – US Senate will monitor every aspect of the allocation of funds requested by the White House to fight Ebola, Senator Richard Shelby has told RIA Novosti.
"We will be looking at every aspect in the appropriation process," Shelby said following the Senate Committee on Appropriations hearing on Wednesday. "I want to make sure they have adequate money, whatever they need <…> to do, whatever they have to do to stop and to treat Ebola before it erupts."
He noted that the allocation of the funds and how it will be directed through different federal agencies has not yet been worked out but the Senate "will be looking at that and hashing it all out in appropriations."
The State Department Resource and Management Office requested $2.89 billion which would be divided between the United States Agency for International Development and the State Department.
Portions of the requested funding would go toward hospital preparedness funding in the United States, according to the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary Sylvia Burwell.
"When we think about the hospital preparedness funding, that is preparedness funding to the front line," Burwell told members of the Senate at the hearing.
Last week US President Barack Obama asked Congress for a record $6.2 billion to defeat Ebola in West Africa. If authorized, funding would help establish permanent infrastructure to improve the region's responsiveness to such crises in the future, according to today's testimony by HHS and State Department personnel.
According to the World Health Organization's data, in total, there have been reported more than 14,000 Ebola-related cases, with more than 5,000 deaths in Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Mali, Spain and the United States.
