South Korea plans to send an advance team of government officials to Ebola-hit West African countries in early November before dispatching medical workers, officials said Monday, amid growing concerns over the spread of the deadly virus.

A group of six or seven officials from the foreign, health and defense ministries will visit either Sierra Leone or Liberia early next month to assess the situation in the affected countries, according to the Seoul government.

Following the advance team, Seoul plans to send a group of volunteer medical workers to one or two affected nations in West Africa, they added. It has been not decided over how many and for how long doctors and other health workers will be sent.

The move came as South Korean President Park Geun-hye said last week that Seoul plans to send a group of medical workers to West African countries in a bid to lend support to the global efforts to contain the spread of the Ebola virus.

The United Nations has been appealing for the international community to further support the efforts to contain the deadly epidemic, which is estimated to have killed more than 4,500 people.

"As safety of medical workers is all the more important, the advance team will closely examine the situation there and then, the government will push for their dispatch," Oh Young-ju, director-general at the foreign ministry's development cooperation bureau, told a press briefing.


The Ebola virus has evolved into a serious crisis that threatens the stability of the international community, the foreign ministry said in a statement. South Korea has so far pledged US$5.6 million to support the fight against the virus.

The Seoul government said that it will begin to muster medical personnel from this week from volunteers, based on their level of expertise. Military health workers to be picked by the defense ministry will be also included in the batch of medical workers.

The government said that it will come up with safety measures to block a possible inflow of the Ebola virus to South Korea. Seoul said that it is also mulling quarantining those medical workers for a certain period of time before they come back to the home country.

Seoul is considering sending medical workers as a form of the disaster relief team that has been mainly dispatched to overseas areas hit by natural disasters.

Amid growing concerns about the spread of the Ebola virus, U.S.
President Barack Obama has called for a "faster and more robust international response to the Ebola epidemic."

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Thursday called on the international community to chip in money to a trust fund that he launched to raise $1 billion to meet a pre-set target of cutting the transmission rate by Dec. 1. (Yonhap)