Responding to Ebola: Cuba Sees a Crisis, and Sends Docs; The US Sees an Opportunity and Sends Troops

[unhappycamper]

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Responding-to-Ebola--Cuba-by-Dave-Lindorff-Cuban-Doctors_Cuban-Embargo_Cuban_doctors_around_the_world_Ebola-140916-544.html



Different responses to Ebola: Cuban MDs, US troops

Responding to Ebola: Cuba Sees a Crisis, and Sends Docs; The US Sees an Opportunity and Sends Troops
By Dave Lindorff
General News 9/16/2014 at 11:00:26

Cuba to send doctors to Ebola areas
Citing security threat, Obama expands U.S. role fighting Ebola

Reading these stories, which ran in, respectively, the BBC and Reuters, one learns that the Cuban government, which runs a small financially hobbled island nation of 11 million people, with a national budget of $50 billion, Gross Domestic Product of 121 billion and per capita GDP of just over $10,000, is dispatching 165 medical personnel to Africa to regions where there are ebola outbreaks, while the US, the world's wealthiest nation, with a population of close to 320 million, a national budget of $3.77 trillion, GDP of $17 trillion, and per capita GDP of over $53,000, is sending troops -- $3000 of them-- to "fight" the ebola epidemic.

Okay, I understand that these troops are supposedly going to be "overseeing" construction of treatment centers, but let's get serious. With an epidemic raging through Africa, where some of the poorest nations in the world are located, what is needed right now are not new structures. Tent facilities would be fine for treating people in this kind of a crisis. What is needed is medical personnel. The important line in the Reuters article about the US "aid" plan, though is that the US troops will

..."establish a military control center for coordination, U.S. officials told reporters.

~snip~

Anyone who thinks this dispatching of US military personnel to Africa is about combating a plague is living in a fantasy world. This is about projecting US military power further into Africa, which has already been a goal of the Obama administration, anxious to prevent China from gaining control over African mineral resources, and to control them for US exploitation.

[leftofcool]

1. Okay but

if I am exposed to Ebola, I want to be in a treatment center, not a tent facility. I am inclined to believe that those living in contagious regions of Africa feel the same.