Health Minister Peter Dutton: "I am not going to put Australian health workers into harm's way without an assurance that we can provide them with the medical assistance if they contract the virus." Credit:Rohan Thomson He said while the Abbott government is negotiating with the US, Britain and European allies to secure a guarantee of medical treatment for any Australian personnel who contracted the lethal virus in West Africa, it was not prepared to "send Australian health workers into harm's way without having 100 per cent assurance that we could provide those people with the support they deserve". The Health Minister also lashed Labor's foreign affairs and health spokeswomen, Tanya Plibersek and Catherine King, for breaking from the bipartisan position on Australia's approach to providing assistance to the virus-hit region. Ms Plibersek and Ms King have stepped up pressure on the government to do more to help fight the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. That call came despite the opposition having been briefed by government officials two weeks ago on enormous logistical and medical challenges involved in sending an Australian team to West Africa.

Labor's foreign affairs spokeswoman Tanya Plibersek says Australia can be doing more to help the global fight against Ebola. Credit:Rohan Thomson Ms Plibersek said on Thursday that she "simply could not believe" it was beyond Australia's capacity to strike a deal with a European partner or the US to provide treatment if an Australian health official were to become sick. "The question here is what's the scenario if we do nothing? We've already heard from the Centre of Disease Control that the current 10,000 cases of Ebola could grow to 1.4 million by the beginning of next year. We've been told by the World Health Organization that we've got a 60-day window of opportunity to close down the spread of this virus," she said. The government is also under pressure from health groups including the Australian Medical Association and the Public Health Association of Australia and aid organisations such as Medecins Sans Frontieres and Save the Children to deploy specialist Australian personnel to support the international effort. Labor's foreign affairs spokeswoman said the advice from those health organisations was that Australia should be involved.

Thus far, Australia has donated $18 million but it has not deployed Australian Medical Assistance Teams. It is estimated about 30 Australian personnel are already working in West Africa for organisations such as the Red Cross and Medecins Sans Frontieres. Mr Dutton said the 30-hour flight back meant it would be impractical, if an Australian citizens became infected, to fly them home for treatment. "I am not going to put Australian health workers into harm's way without an assurance that we can provide them with the medical assistance if they contract the virus," Mr Dutton said. "There are countries in Europe, only a few hours by aeroplane away from West Africa that have decided at this point in time not to send their health workers into harm's way in West Africa.

"Ms Plibersek needs to explain today what the evacuation plans would be, how it is that if a health worker contracted the Ebola virus, they would receive medical treatment? Because if the advice is not available to government, I don't know how it is available to the opposition." "It is important for us to understand that bringing health workers back to Australia for a 30-hour flight, it is unlikely that they would survive that flight and Labor seem to think we can dispatch plane loads worth of health workers across to West Africa without the proper arrangements in place." Foreign Affairs and Defence department officials say the trip home for an infected Australian could take up to a week when all the necessary logistical and medical arrangements that would be needed were taken into account. Mr Dutton noted the UN had publicly welcomed Australia's financial contribution to its efforts. Foreign Affairs officials said that while negotiations had been underway for weeks with ally nations, a "politically bankable" agreement would need to be in place to ensure Australians could get proper treatment if infected.

Those nations are within a few hours flight of the affected West African nations but officials said no nation had been willing to supply such a guarantee. It is accepted by other nations that any Australian infected by Ebola could not be flown home from West Africa because of the long travel time involved. Some nations are sensitive about the treatment of Ebola-infected non-nationals in their hospitals following the infection of health workers in Spain and the US who treated Ebola-infected patients. Others, such as the United Kingdom do not wish to bring back even their own Ebola-infected nationals for treatment, for fear of the virus spreading to others. The UK Navy is sending a floating hospital ship. Officials say it is clinically unrealistic to evacuate personnel from West Africa to Australia. They added that Japan and South Korea are also yet to deploy their nationals to West Africa, partly because of the difficulty of evacuating any of their citizens over long distances. The UK, US and France are setting up treatment centres in West Africa to treat any of their personnel who become infected, but these facilities are not yet in operation. Australian officials are said to be closely monitoring the establishment of these centres.

Ebola has an incubation period of up to 21 days. Once an infected person moves from having a fever to the so-called "secretory" phase, it can be very difficult to move them safely. Government officials said that to the best of their knowledge, no one had yet been moved once they had entered that phase. The Australian military does not have aero-medical evacuation capacity - such as a portable isolation unit - necessary to evacuate a patient infected with a virus like Ebola. A defence official said that it was not possible to compare an agreement that had allowed Australian soldiers wounded in Afghanistan to be treated in Germany as Ebola was an infectious disease. To date, the fatality rate for people who have contracted Ebola stands at 48 per cent documented for West Africans, 56 per cent for health care workers, but the rate could be as high as 70 per cent because of under-reporting. Greens health spokesman Richard di Natale, a doctor who has worked with HIV patients in India, urged the government to commit health professionals who were willing to travel to the affected area.

He accused the government of hiding behind a cloak of advice that said "we can't get people out" from the affected areas and the advice of the chief health officer. Senator Di Natale said the government's response was pathetic and that it was only a matter of time before an Australian was infected and that the response had been slow because there were "no votes in poor black Africans dying". "If this was another issue, we would be bending over backwards to ensure that we were negotiating with those countries so we had a co-operative agreement." Loading Follow us on Twitter