Written by Dennis Thompson | From U.S. News & World Report

U.S. troops have arrived in the beleaguered nation of Liberia, the epicenter of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Their first mission: to set up an isolation center for doctors and other health-care workers infected with the deadly disease.

Six U.S. military planes arrived Thursday, and the United States may eventually send as many as 4,000 troops to help combat the viral outbreak that has already claimed more than 4,000 lives. Other nations, including Germany and Great Britain, have also pledged support, CBS News reported.

The troops’ arrival came the same day that the heads of West African nations struggling with the Ebola outbreak pleaded with world leaders for massive increases in financial and medical aid.

“Our people are dying,” Sierra Leone President Ernest Bai Koroma said by videoconference at a World Bank meeting in Washington, D.C. Calling the epidemic “a tragedy unforeseen in modern times,” he said the world wasn’t responding fast enough as children are becoming orphans and doctors and nurses are dying in vain efforts to help the sick.

Also Thursday, the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention likened the Ebola crisis to the early days of the AIDS epidemic, which also started in Africa.

Read more at U.S. News & World Report