UK health volunteers head to S. Leone to tackle Ebola

LONDON: A first group of volunteers from Britain´s state National Health Service left for Sierra Leone on Saturday to join the Ebola epidemic fightback.

More than 30 NHS workers flew out of London Heathrow Airport and were due to arrive in the capital Freetown on Sunday for a week of training before moving to British-built treatment centres around the west African country.

The group includes doctors, nurses, clinicians, psychiatrists and emergency medicine consultants.

"I found myself less and less able to hear about the evolving situation in west Africa and the increasing loss of life and do nothing. I felt I just had to go," said Doctor Hannah Ryan, 29, from the intensive care unit at Aintree University Hospital in Liverpool, northwest England.

Doctor James Lavers, 37, an intensive care registrar from Bangor in northwest Wales, said: "This could be the biggest medical disaster of my lifetime, killing hundreds of thousands of people in the region.

To prevent this from happening and save vast numbers of lives, large-scale intervention has to happen now."

The volunteers have gone through nine days of intensive training at a specialist Ministry of Defence unit in northern England, which has a replica treatment centre.

More than 1,000 NHS workers have put their names forward and more teams of British volunteers are due to go out to Sierra Leone over the coming weeks.