Aljazeera

Cuba will deploy nearly 300 additional medical workers to West Africa to help fight the deadly Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia, officials said Friday. 

Regla Angulo, head of Cuba’s medical relief agency, said doctors and nurses were undergoing intense training ahead of their deployment, working in mock field hospitals similar to those they expect to encounter in Africa.

Friday’s announcement follows a pledge earlier this month by Cuba to send 165 doctors and nurses to Sierra Leone. The entire staff is expected to arrive in West Africa in early October after completing infection-control training administered by the World Health Organization (WHO).

Some members of the medical team have already been working in Sierra Leone and Guinea for a numbers of years and will continue to do so, the WHO said, adding that the Cuban mission was the “largest offer of a foreign medical team from a single country” during the current outbreak.