GENEVA: The Red Cross said yesterday that it planned to train more than 2,000 extra volunteers to step up its response to the deadly Ebola outbreak ravaging West Africa.
“With dozens of new cases emerging daily, this outbreak is showing no signs of slowing down,” said Alasan Senghore, head of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies’ Africa unit. “People are dying. If we are serious about stopping Ebola, we cannot afford to delay ramping up our response,” he said.
Since the outbreak began at the beginning of the year, IFRC said it had trained some 3,500 volunteers across the three hardest-hit countries, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, and that it planned to push that number to over 5,600.
Those three countries account for nearly all of the 2,296 Ebola deaths seen so far in the West Africa outbreak, according to the World Health Organization.
“Engaging communities through our trained volunteers will have an immediate and large pay-off, as messages of prevention will be shared by community members themselves,” Senghore said.
AFP
