Australian Medical Association (AMA) president Brian Owler said Australia's response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa has been a "shambles."
Owler told reporters that though it is said that 16 health workers have been given training to go to West Africa and do dangerous work, neither the AMA nor the Chief Medical Officer has information about the people who were going. The officials also do not know about the kind of training given to the health workers and whether they were properly prepared for the job.
"It's not the Ausmat [Australian Medical Assistance] teams that you would expect would be trained to do this work," Owler told reporters in Sydney.
"Who are these people? If anything is going to be irresponsible it would be a last minute announcement about people who are ill-equipped or ill-trained to go and do this dangerous work," he said, reports The Guardian.
Urging the government to announce its plan of action to help the fight against the Ebola outbreak, Owler also queried what the administration plans to do if a potentially infected person arrives in Australia.
Turning to the case of the Cairns nurse Sue Ellen Kovack, who had quarantined herself after showing signs of fever after retuning from Sierra Leone, Owler said that the nurse followed the correct procedures by avoiding contact with others and alerting authorities.
Australia Prime Minister Tony Abbott had said Thursday that he was considering a personal request from U.S. President Obama to send a medical team to West Africa to help in the fight against Ebola. However, Abbott added that the priority of the Australian government was to respond to an outbreak in the Asia-Pacific region.
"While we are responding in West Africa as we should, our priority is inevitably ... here at home and in our region," Abbott told the Parliament, reports the Associated Press.
