U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power visits Ebola-stricken countries

NEW YORK, Oct. 27 (UPI) -- U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power landed in Guinea Sunday to see firsthand how West Africa is responding to the Ebola outbreak.

Power explained on Twitter that she chose to visit Guinea first because it was the "1st country in current outbreak."

She will also be visiting Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Power's travel to the three countries most affected by the Ebola outbreak should help to lessen the public's fear about Ebola, she told NBC News. "It will be showing in the mere fact of going as a member of the president's cabinet that we shouldn't be afraid."

"We need to take trips like this, we need to be part of the solution and not run away from something, 'cause it'll come to us if we don't deal with it at its source."

While in Guinea, Power met with an NGO worker who likened the response to the Ebola outbreak to "running behind a train and the train is going faster than us."

"The international response to Ebola needs to be taken to a wholly different scale than it is right now," said Power, who pointed to the need for all U.N. member states "to send docs, to send beds, to send the reasonable amount of money."

Power has high praise, however, for health care workers, calling them "true heroes."

On Sunday, President Barack Obama chaired a meeting on Ebola in which he was briefed on policy considerations for health care workers returning from West Africa. According to the White House, Obama "emphasized that these measures must recognize that healthcare workers are an indispensable element of our effort to lead the international community to contain and ultimately end this outbreak at its source, and should be crafted so as not to unnecessarily discourage those workers from serving."

Power has criticized the decision by some states to quarantine travelers arriving in the U.S. from Ebola-affected countries, reiterating the president's message: "We need to find a way when they come home that they are treated like conquering heroes and not stigmatized for the tremendous work that they've done."