Health: Tick-borne Encephalitis

Debate between Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford and Lord Trees

Tuesday 5th November 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford]

The noble Lord is right to raise this issue. We have been making sure that action is taken quickly. Tick bite avoidance is a key message in this area and is the same for TBEV as for Lyme disease. PHE has worked with local authorities and key stakeholders in the relevant areas, informing them about TBE and the tick toolkit documents and guidance, so that they can remind the public, their staff and visitors to be tick aware. Specific awareness campaigns will come forward in spring 2020. The material for these will include information on Lyme disease and TBE. In addition, there will be research programmes on TBE, to ensure that we in the UK are as aware as we can be about it. To be clear, there has been only one probable case of TBE infection diagnosed —a European visitor bitten by a tick in the UK. At the moment, this is a very low risk to anyone in the UK and a low risk to those in the areas.

[Lord Trees (CB)]

My Lords, I do not want to be alarmist but the discovery of tick-borne encephalitis virus in the UK is worrying. The tick vectors of this viral infection are widespread throughout the UK and are maintained on a variety of animal hosts, including wild deer, which are now extremely common in lowland as well as upland areas. The number of clinical cases in Europe has been steadily increasing and, while it is true that something like two-thirds of cases are non-clinical, as many as up to 10% of those affected may suffer severe neurological sequelae, especially children and—noble Lords may like to know—the elderly. I ask the noble Lord: will the Government reintroduce the mandatory tick treatment of pets imported into the UK under the pet travel scheme? Is the noble Lord satisfied that we are doing all we can in the UK, in terms of research and preventive actions with regard to biosecurity, to safeguard animal and human health in this era of climate change and globalisation?

[Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford]

I thank the noble Lord for that question, although I generally identify as a noble Baroness. We are continuing surveillance studies for TBEV in ticks and wildlife, and we plan to monitor its prevalence, distribution, maintenance and spread in the UK to ensure oversight of the situation. We have based our understanding of the risk assessment on recent experience in the Netherlands, where TBEV was recently identified. The estimated risk there of Lyme disease from a tick bite is 1:50, while the estimated risk of TBEV from a tick bite is 1:500,000. As regards us doing enough work, we have a national contingency plan written to deal with vector-borne diseases and understanding the effect of climate change, which gives us a sense of the challenges that we face.