About 1,000 fewer U.S. troops than initially planned will be deployed to West Africa to help fight an Ebola outbreak, a general in command of the operation says.
Army Maj. Gen. Gary Volesky reports 2,200 troops are now in Liberia and the number will top out just short of 3,000 in mid-December, according to
Stars and Stripes.
The Pentagon had planned to send about 4,000 troops to Africa to combat the largest-ever Ebola outbreak, with a death toll now topping 5,000,
CBS News reports.
The troops help with engineering and logistical demands.
"What we found working with [the U.S. Agency for International Development] and the government of Liberia was that there was a lot of capacity here that we didn’t know about before, and so that enabled us to reduce the forces that we thought we originally had to bring," Volesky said Wednesday in a teleconference from the Liberian capital, Monrovia, Stars and Stripes reports.
So far no U.S. troops nor Defense Department civilians have shown any signs of infection, he added.
"You won’t see soldiers roaming all over Liberia; we’ve got it very controlled," he said.
"They go places where there’s a mission, and we just make sure that we’re following all those protocols."
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