INTERNATIONAL Development Secretary Justine Greening yesterday flew from West Oxfordshire to West Africa with troops helping in the fight against Ebola.

The cabinet minister left RAF Brize Norton near Carterton for Freetown, Sierra Leone, with about 100 soldiers from the Royal Army Medical Corps.

The UK is leading the international response to the disease, and has pledged a £125m aid package, including support for 700 treatment beds.

The medics were from Catterick-based 35 Squadron, 5 Armoured Medical Regiment and Royal Army Medical Corps.

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They will staff an Ebola training academy alongside 90 personnel from 22 Field Hospital who left for Sierra Leone last week.

Ms Greening will visit the academy, as well as the site of a 92-bed treatment facility in Kerry Town, which is in the final stages of being constructed, for about two days.

Before embarking on the six-hour flight on the Boeing 737-600, Ms Greening said: “Halting the disease in West Africa is the most effective way of preventing Ebola infecting people here in the UK.

“That is why we are providing 700 treatment beds in Sierra Leone, sending vital supplies such as chlorine and protective clothing and training hundreds of health workers.

“I look forward to seeing for myself how British Army medics and engineers, as well as our humanitarian and health workers, are spearheading the UK’s efforts to contain and ultimately defeat Ebola.”

The UK is sending 750 military personnel, including the Navy’s RFA Argus.

Mark Goldring, chief executive of Cowley-based charity Oxfam, has called for more troops, funding and medical staff to be made available to combat Ebola.

Mr Goldring said there was a window of less than two months available to curb the spread of the deadly virus and there remained a “crippling shortfall” in military personnel to provide logistical support across West Africa.

He added: “We are in the eye of a storm. We cannot allow Ebola to immobilise us in fear, but instead we must move towards a common mission to stop it from getting worse.

“Countries that have failed to commit troops, doctors and enough funding are in danger of costing lives.”

Yesterday the European Commission announced its intention to mobilise funds from the Horizon 2020 research fund for clinical trials for a vaccine like one at the Jenner Institute at Headington’s Churchill Hospital.

The commission is working with the World Health Organisation and the European Medicines agency to define the most useful research to spend funds on.

Last month mum-of-two Ruth Atkins, from Marcham, near Abingdon, became the first person in the world to be injected with an Ebola gene as part of the battle against the deadly virus. She was one of 60 people who will be given a trial vaccine for the virus at Churchill Hospital’s Centre for Clinical Vaccinology and Tropical Medicine.

The latest epidemic has killed about 4,500 people, prompting what the United Nations has called a “health crisis unparalleled in modern times”.

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