South Korea has successfully completed its near three-month Ebola relief mission in the West African nation of Sierra Leone without reporting any cases of the contagion among its medical workers, the foreign ministry said Monday.
Seoul’s third and last team of two doctors and three nurses returned home on Monday after wrapping up a monthlong mission at an Ebola treatment center in Goderich, near Sierra Leone’s capital of Freetown.
They all showed no signs of the Ebola contagion, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said, citing the results of the health examination conducted upon their arrival.
South Korea has dispatched a total of 24 doctors and nurses in three batches to the treatment facility since mid-December. Each team worked for about one month, helping test and treat patients of the highly contagious epidemic.
It was the first time the South Korean government has sent an emergency relief team to fight the outbreak of an epidemic overseas.
“This emergency relief team had been on a mission for the longest period of time in South Korea’s foreign relief assistance history to deal with a new type of a disaster,” the ministry said in a statement.
No case of contagion has been reported among all the South Korean medical workers although the returning team will undergo the necessary three-week quarantine at a local facility after entering the country later in the day, according to the ministry.
A group of foreign and defense ministry officials, who were in Sierra Leone to support the relief mission, also returned home on Monday with the medical team, the ministry noted.
Wrapping up the Ebola relief mission, the government plans to devise various bilateral and multilateral projects to further help the Ebola-hit country.
It also plans to publish a white paper based on the latest relief assistance as well as ways to deal with similar disasters in the future.
The death toll from the deadly virus is believed to exceed
10,000 in the West Africa region, including Guinea and Liberia.(Yonhap)
