THE photographs show scenes that could be straight from a sci-fi apocalypse movie: figures in white bio-hazard suits tending patients in a temporary isolation ward.

Except this is no movie. The people in our photographs are army medics based in York. For two weeks, about 120 doctors, nurses and combat medical technicians from 22 Field Hospital have been training in a hangar in Strensall.

Later this month they will fly out to Sierra Leone, where they will join the front line in the battle to contain the deadly Ebola virus. More than 3,400 people are now thought to have died in the outbreak, mainly in West Africa.

Health services in poverty-stricken West African nations such as Sierra Leone, Liberia, Nigeria and Senegal have struggled to control the disease.

Charities have been despatching aid workers to the affected countries – among them North Yorkshire woman Cokie Van der Velde, who wrote poignantly in yesterday’s Press about the exhaustion and terror faced by those confronting the disease.

But so far, the efforts have been too little, too late. York’s army medics could be the beginning of a real step-up in international efforts to contain the outbreak.

They are properly trained, properly equipped, and will have the use of a 12-bed field hospital in which to isolate and treat those infected.

The situation they will be flying into is a terrifying one. But if anybody is equipped to deal with such conditions, it is these army medics.

Their mobilisation to Sierra Leone is not simply an act of charity. There have already been cases of ebola in the USA and now Europe.

The men and women of 22 Field Hospital really will be at the forefront of the fight to prevent this becoming a global outbreak.

We salute their extraordinary courage. When they fly out, our thoughts will be with them, and with their families.