South Korea’s foreign ministry and related government agencies were to hold a meeting Monday to discuss details about the dispatch of medical workers to Ebola-hit West African countries, officials said.
Last week, South Korean President Park Geun-hye said that Seoul plans to send a group of medical workers to West African countries in a bid to lend support to the global efforts to contain the spread of the deadly Ebola virus.
Cho Tae-yul, Seoul’s second vice minister of foreign affairs, plans to preside over a meeting later in the day with officials from the health ministry and other related agencies to exchange views about plans to send medical personnel to the affected African countries, according to the foreign ministry.
The decision came as the United Nations has been appealing for the international community to further support the efforts to contain the deadly epidemic, which is estimated to have killed 4,500 people.
The composition of medical workers and the timing of the dispatch are likely to be discussed at the Monday meeting, officials said.
The government is mulling sending an advance team to assess situations in West Africa before finally deciding how many and when medical workers will be dispatched, they added.
Seoul is considering sending medical workers as a form of the disaster relief team that has been mainly dispatched to overseas areas hit by natural disasters.
Amid growing concerns about the spread of the Ebola virus, U.S. President Barack Obama has called for a “faster and more robust international response to the Ebola epidemic.”
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Thursday called on the international community to chip in money to a trust fund that he launched to raise $1 billion to meet a pre-set target of cutting the transmission rate by Dec. 1. (Yonhap)
