Polio

Baroness McIntosh of Pickering Excerpts

Thursday 23rd June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kamall (Con)]

First, I thank the noble Lord for his recognition of one of the challenges of ministerial office, as he will know from his own experience. It is important that we recognise that vaccine-derived polio has the potential to spread, but it is rare and the risk to the public overall is limited. The majority of Londoners are fully protected against polio and will not need to take any more action, but the NHS will begin reaching out to parents of children under five in London who are not up to date. But we are asking for it both ways and for parents to check their records. Let us be clear that the UK is considered to be free from polio, but we recognise a potential risk given our world-leading surveillance of sewage.

On the noble Lord’s specific question, we are quite clear that people must come forward for all vaccines. Sometimes during lockdown people were unable to see a doctor or nurse in person, and the NHS is catching up with that anyway, but the NHS will keep sending the message to try to identify people who have not been vaccinated. At the same time, we are encouraging people to check their records. Let us be clear: we detected this very early in the chain, and it has perhaps come from someone who took an oral vaccine overseas and has excreted it into the system.

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

I congratulate the UKHSA and the Environment Agency on the investment they have made. When was the polio first detected—there are reports that it was detected as early as February—and when might they be able to narrow down the area in which it has been found?

[Lord Kamall (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for that question. There is routine surveillance that happens anyway. However, in this case they have detected it in more than one surveillance. Quite often, it is seen as a one-off and then not seen again for some time; in this case, it has been detected at each interval of the surveillance. We know it is from the Beckton Sewage Treatment Works—in that part of London. I must be careful about the words I use here: clearly, it is mixed up with a lot of other stuff, and we must now work out how we go along the pipe, as it were, and investigate individual pipes to see whether we can locate the source. In theory, it might be possible to find individual households or streets but it is too early to do so. What we are doing here is really world-beating: it is a first and shows that we are ahead. However, one issue in being ahead is that we detect things that would not have been detected earlier, and people are worried about them.