Ray Locker

USA TODAY

The Pentagon is rushing the development of an isolation system for U.S. troops who may have been infected by or exposed to Ebola while stationed in West Africa to treat the more than 15,000 people with the virus, a newly released Pentagon document shows.

The Defense Threat Reduction Agency filed a request Monday for permission to issue a sole-source contract to St. Louis-based Production Products Manufacturing and Sales to develop a transport isolation system that would "be used for the safe evacuation of Ebola-exposed or Ebola-infected personnel from affected areas."

Such a system would allow patients and troops exposed to Ebola to travel home on military aircraft. Air Force documents show that transport of patients with Ebola back to the United States is done by Phoenix Air, a Georgia-based contractor that can fly only one patient at a time on its modified business jet aircraft.

The new system could hold up to eight patients on litters and 12 ambulatory patients, the DTRA document shows.

Production Products, DTRA says, has made the containment system used to transport the four Americans infected with Ebola while in Africa and transported to the United States. It would take at least 18 months to develop a new system through normal channels, DTRA says, so it is issuing the contract to Production Products to have it ready in 4½ months.

"Abiding by" the normal "time line would result in the inability … to safely evacuate immediately either exposed or ill U.S. citizens, to include military personnel, from theater should national authorities evoke evacuation operations."

DTRA's move, which is backed by help from the Air ForceLife Cycle Management Center in Ohio, is one of many steps by the government to deal with the Ebola crisis. There are 2,200 U.S. troops in Liberia building medical facilities, while President Obama visited the National Institutes of Health Tuesday to call for more money to help fight the outbreak, the worst since the virus was identified in 1976.

So far, almost 6,000 people have died in West Africa from the virus.

Last week, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency said it was issuing a sole-source contact to Otherlab of San Francisco to develop a "Care Cube" that would envelop patients infected with the Ebola virus while allowing caregivers to work without wearing the bulky biohazard suits needed to protect them.