Sierra Leone: Ebola

Viscount Ridley Excerpts

Monday 30th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Ridley (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, and congratulate her on securing this debate and on bringing her own experience to bear on it. I will raise two issues briefly. The first is the dreadful initial response of the World Health Organization and what lessons are being learned from it, and the second is the very recent development at a British university of a rapid blood test for diagnosing Ebola.

On the first issue, I make it clear that I am not criticising all those who worked incredibly hard under very dangerous conditions to bring this terrifying epidemic under control, including those working for the World Health Organization and the UK Government. My target is what happened at an earlier stage. I will quote from a devastating report prepared by Médecins Sans Frontières a year into the 2014 outbreak. It says:

“On 31 March, MSF publicly declared the outbreak as ‘unprecedented’ due to the geographic spread of the cases … On 1 April, the World Health Organization … via its chief spokesperson in Geneva, was the first to call into question MSF’s declaration, objecting that the virus dynamics were not unlike those of past outbreaks, nor was the outbreak unprecedented … We raised the alarm publicly again on 21 June, declaring that the epidemic was out of control and that we could not respond to the large number of new cases and locations alone … It was like shouting into a desert”.


The report says that,

“members of the WHO in Guinea and Sierra Leone downplayed the epidemic’s spread, insisting it was under control and accusing MSF of causing unnecessary panic”.

At the end of June, there was a World Health Organization meeting in Geneva. Marie-Christine Ferir of MSF says:

“I remember emphasising that we had the chance to halt the epidemic in Liberia if help was sent now … It was early in the outbreak and there was still time. The call for help was heard but no action was taken”.


She said that meetings happened but action did not. It was not until 8 August, after more than 1,000 people had already died, that the WHO at last declared the outbreak a,

“public health emergency of international concern”.

The WHO Executive Board has since resolved to enact reforms for epidemic response, but very little has happened. Could the Minister tell us what pressure we in the UK are bringing to bear on the WHO, an organisation to which we pay $21 million a year, and which recently thought fit to make Robert Mugabe a good will ambassador?

The second issue is technical. During the 2014 outbreak, it took five days or more to get a result from a blood test to see whether somebody had Ebola. That was eventually reduced to between five and eight hours, but it still cost $100 a test. One of WHO’s mistakes, which puzzled people at the time, was to insist on one technology that was laboratory-bound and expensive: GeneXpert, made by Cepheid. It was hardly used, because it was simply too complicated.

Dr Sterghios Moschos at Northumbria University announced last month that in collaboration with BioGene Ltd and PHE at Porton Down he has developed a simple 70-minute diagnostic test that detects the Ebola virus reliably when spiked into cow’s blood. He has not been able to test it on people for the good reason that at the moment nobody has Ebola. But he says that,

“in the future, stockpiling instruments and tests for known high-risk diseases, such as Ebola virus disease, would make mass screening capacity available in a matter of days or even hours”.

Could the Minister say whether the British Government will look into this to see how his test could be developed and stockpiled as he suggests? Could they perhaps consider deploying it at ports of entry for protection against not just Ebola, because it is a platform that could work for Lassa, dengue, West Nile, yellow fever and Zika? I should declare a possible interest. I have no interest in Dr Moschos’s work or in BioGene but I have one in another Newcastle company, QuantuMDx, which is working on similar rapid and inexpensive tests for diseases, although not Ebola.