Russian plane with medics flies to Ebola-stricken Guinea

MOSCOW, August 22. /ITAR-TASS/. Russian virologists have arrived in Guinea and have joined the efforts to eliminate the outbreak of Ebola fever in that West-African country, the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a press release Friday.

"A team of Russian virologists and bacteriologists arrived in Conakry (Guinean capital city) August 22 and got down to business in close contact with the Russian embassy, the local healthcare agencies and representatives of the World Health Organization," the statement said. "We are confident that Russia's active engagement in the international collective efforts will bring sizable contribution to the eradication of the outbreak of this lethal disease."

A decision to dispatch a specialized team of highly qualified experts in virology and epidemiology to western Africa, which has been stricken by an unprecedented epidemic of Ebola fever, was taken by the Russian government. They have taken along with them a top-notch mobile lab for doing emergency tests on the spot.

Russian plane with medics flies to Ebola-stricken Guinea

The experts are staff members of the Louis Pasteur Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology in St Petersburg. They visited Guinea in mid-July.

“We’re sending the top-rate professionals there,” Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Olga Golodets said Thursday.

The epidemic has carried away more than 1,000 human lives and has left 1,848 people infected. No universally recognized or certified vaccine for the Ebola virus, the endemic source of which is located in Western Africa, exists today.