Marisa and Keith Bell are among the 700 people who have put up their hands to help in the fight against Ebola.
But the Adelaide couple are yet to hear from the Canberra-based company contracted to send volunteers to Sierra Leone.
Both registered nurses, they describe themselves as 'ordinary' health workers, and like the hundreds registered with Aspen Medical, just want to get into Sierra Leone and start pitching in.
'You feel helpless and you want to be able to help,' Mrs Bell told AAP on Thursday.
'It's just frustrating to see the infection really spreading unnecessarily and people dying needlessly.'
An Aspen Medical spokesman told Sky News on Friday the company had contacted both Mr and Mrs Bell, but had not heard back.
'We contacted Maria Bell via email inviting her to complete her application at 3.09pm on 8 November. Keith Bell was contacted with the same message at 9.17am on 12 November,' he said.
'Neither Marisa nor Keith have completed their applications as of now.'
Mr and Mrs Bell have travelled to Brisbane, where world leaders are gathering for the G20 summit, to support calls from aid organisations and politicians for more action on fighting Ebola.
The virus has so far killed more than 5000 people across five West African countries, with Sierra Leone the worst affected.
'They don't even have disinfectant, they don't even have running water,' she said.
'It's obviously very fatal but you can actually stop it and treat people at early stages.'
The husband and wife team is desperate to help.
'We'd like to send a message to the Australian government that there's many more of us that are keen to assist,' Ms Bell said.
An Australian project manager was expected to arrive this week in Sierra Leone as part of an advance team to supervise the staffing of the 100-bed British built facility that will be funded by the government.
Aspen boss Glenn Keys has said up to one in five of the 240 staff at the hospital could be Australian.
It's expected the staff will undergo several days of training, then work for three to four weeks in the hospital before entering a three-week quarantine process and returning home.
The Abbott government argued that until two weeks ago that it did not have an assurance from a third country that the health workers would receive appropriate treatment and evacuation if they contracted the virus.
Meanwhile, Mali is scrambling to prevent a major Ebola epidemic after the deaths of an Islamic cleric and a nurse, as the official death toll in the worst ever epidemic of the virus passed 5000.
The two deaths in Mali have dashed optimism that the country was free of the highly-infectious pathogen and caused alarm in the capital Bamako, where the imam was washed by mourners at a mosque after his death.
It came as the World Health Organization (WHO) announced on Wednesday that the outbreak - almost entirely confined to west Africa - had passed a gruesome landmark, with 5160 deaths from around 14,000 cases since Ebola emerged in Guinea in December.
The WHO and aid organisations have frequently pointed out that the real count of cases and deaths could be much higher.
In Mali, the latest country to see infections, the clinic where the imam died has been quarantined, with around 30 people trapped inside including medical staff, patients and 15 African soldiers from the UN mission in Mali.
The nurse who died of Ebola had treated the imam at Bamako's Pasteur clinic.
Teams of investigators are tracing health workers, and scouring the capital and the imam's home district in northeastern Guinea for scores of people who could have been exposed.
The deaths have raised fears of widespread contamination as they were unrelated to Mali's only other confirmed fatality, a two-year-old girl who had also arrived from Guinea in October.
A doctor at the Pasteur clinic is thought to have contracted the virus and is under observation outside the capital, the clinic said.
A friend who visited the imam has also died of probable Ebola, the WHO said.
The virus is estimated to have killed around 70 per cent of its victims, often shutting down their organs and causing unstoppable bleeding.
Ebola emerged in Guinea in December, spreading to neighbouring Liberia and then Sierra Leone.
Cases are "still skyrocketing" in western Sierra Leone, according to the WHO, although Liberia says it has seen a drop in new cases from a daily peak of more than 500 in September to around 50.
Source: http://www.skynews.com.au/news/national/2014/11/14/more-than-700-waiting-to-help-fight-ebola.html#sthash.ScwNPlGq.dpuf
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