Australia can't deploy health workers to Ebola hotspots: PM

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott has said it will be "irresponsible" to send Australian personnel to an Ebola hotspot "when we don't have any means of effectively evacuating such personnel back to Australia and we have no commitments from other countries to treat them there either".

"I think it would be a little irresponsible of an Australian government to order Australian personnel into this very dangerous situation if we didn't have effective risk mitigation strategies in place, and at the moment there is no way of doing that," the Sydney Morning Herald quoted Abbott as telling reporters Thursday.

Health Minister Peter Dutton has also said that without such agreements in place, any Australian health worker who became infected would face a minimum 30-hour flight back home and would be unlikely to survive.

The Labour party's foreign affairs and health spokeswomen Tanya Plibersek and Catherine King had criticised the Australian government for not contributing enough to the international fight against Ebola.