Obama to end anti-Ebola military mission in Africa

President Obama will announce Wednesday an end to the five-month military mission to battle an Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

Last September, the Defense Department deployed hundreds of U.S. troops to West Africa to support the U.S. Agency for International Development and other international partners combat Ebola.

Those troops constructed Ebola Treatment Units, trained local and international healthcare workers on how to treat those infected with the disease and provided support to humanitarian and public-health workers who provided care throughout West Africa.

At the height of the epidemic, there were 2,800 troops deployed to West Africa, said Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. John Kirby. Now, that mission is coming to an end, he said in a statement Tuesday evening.

“Given the success of the U.S. response to the crisis, the majority of [department] personnel in West Africa will now return home,” he said. “Today, around 1,500 of them are already back to their duty stations and nearly all will return by April 30. All personnel have or will undergo established controlled monitoring procedures.”

The Wall Street Journal was the first to report that Mr. Obama planned to withdraw military troops from West Africa and declare the Ebola mission a success.

USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah called the mission a success, saying Ebola cases had declined 80 percent and that new cases were down to just a couple per day in Liberia, where the U.S. took the leading role in the international mission — France and Britain each took the lead in their respective former colonies of Guinea and Sierra Leone, the other two nations suffering an epidemic outbreak.

“Just 10 months since the first U.S. government personnel deployed, we have delivered extraordinary results,” he said.

According to the World Health Organization, more than 8,000 people were killed in the three West African nations, in the worst ebola outbreak in history.

Some cases involved Americans, most of them missionaries and medical workers, though nobody who caught the disease here also died.

Most of the U.S. cases survived, thanks to first-world medical care and hospital practices. There also was no spreading of the disease beyond health-care workers — and little spreading of the disease at all — because of the absence of cultural practices involving funerals and burial that provide the virus with its main means of spreading in Africa.

Mr. Obama and public-health officials were strongly criticized for their response to Ebola, particularly after two health-care workers in Texas caught the virus while treating a man who had been infected in Africa and would shortly die. The sending of troops to West Africa and the associated world efforts were intended to stem the epidemic at its source.