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Obama issues Ebola challenge

Asks that nations step up response to the epidemic

ATLANTA — President Obama challenged world powers on Tuesday to step up the global response to the Ebola outbreak ravaging three West African countries, warning that unless health care workers, medical equipment, and treatment centers are deployed quickly, the disease could take hundreds of thousands of lives.

"This epidemic is going to get worse before it gets better," Obama said at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where he met with doctors who had just returned from West Africa. But "right now, the world still has the opportunity to save lives."

He said "the world is looking" to the United States to lead the fight against Ebola. "This is a responsibility that we embrace," he said. But he called on other nations to respond as well.

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The US response includes deployment of some 3,000 US military personnel, including doctors, to Liberia and Senegal to wage war on a virus that so far has outstripped meager efforts to contain it. The Pentagon is to build 17 treatment centers of 100 beds each in Liberia, the country hardest hit so far in the epidemic, with five of them in the capital, Monrovia, the first large city to have an outbreak of Ebola.

Administration officials said they urgently needed strong responses from Britain and France, two countries that have colonial ties to the three hardest-hit African countries. Liberia was colonized by freed US slaves beginning in 1822; the British colonized Sierra Leone, and the French have longtime ties to Guinea.

A French official said that France on Sunday sent an additional $13 million to Guinea for 2 tons of medical equipment and the construction of medical centers. The French also sent 24 doctors to Senegal and Ivory Coast. British troops, the United Kingdom government said last week, are headed to Sierra Leone to build and staff a 63-bed facility near the capital, Freetown.

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On Tuesday in Geneva, senior United Nations officials said cases of the disease were rising at an almost exponential rate, with the number of reported cases climbing to 4,985, including 2,461 deaths. Half of the infections, according to Bruce Aylward, an assistant director-general of the World Health Organization, occurred in the past 21 days, underscoring the acceleration of the outbreak.

"We don't know where the numbers are going with this," Aylward said at a news conference in Geneva.

He warned that the rapid spread of the disease "is going to require a much faster escalation of the response if we are to beat the escalation of the virus."

Just how fast the US military can build the treatment centers in Monrovia is still in question. Liberian officials say that 1,000 beds are needed in Liberia in the next week alone to contain the disease.

But US military officials cautioned that it would take time — perhaps as much as two weeks — before personnel arrive to begin setting up the first treatment centers.

The promise of a ramped-up US response "could change the trajectory of the spread of the disease — if that response is fast," said Steven Radelet, a former development specialist at both the Treasury and State departments in the Clinton and Obama administrations who now advises the Liberian government on economic matters. "But the question is, how fast can they turn this to action?"

Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said that the military was setting up a staging base in Senegal, where no one has contracted Ebola at this point. A large contingent of US military personnel will be there; most of the rest will be in Liberia to provide logistics, training, and construction support, but not to direct patient care.

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Before leaving the White House for Atlanta on Tuesday morning, Obama met with Dr. Kent Brantly, the US physician with Samaritan's Purse who contracted Ebola when he was treating patients in Liberia.

In Liberia, half a year after the start of the outbreak, officials remain incapable of carrying out the most basic steps needed to stop the spread of Ebola, including picking up the dead and isolating potentially infectious people.

Because of a shortage of ambulances, families with visibly sick relatives take taxis to overcrowded treatment centers, where they are often turned away.