Ebola

Baroness Hayman Excerpts

Thursday 8th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayman (CB)]

My Lords, like other speakers I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, on introducing this debate and his consistent commitment to health in the developing world. I am delighted to be able to take part in the debate but fear my contribution would probably be more useful in five weeks’ time, when I will have returned—I hope—from a visit to Sierra Leone to see for myself the work of some of the agencies with which I am associated. I declare my interests in those, recorded in the register.

Many lessons of the Ebola outbreak are already emerging. The speed of response is one that others referred to. The need for the international community to have a plan that is both flexible—because not every emergency is the same—and already funded is tremendously important. We all have a responsibility to look at how the international community could prepare for further outbreaks. As others said, not only will they occur but we cannot consider them to be someone else’s problem. Ebola is not an airborne disease, for which we all throughout the world must be extremely grateful, but other diseases are airborne. The interconnectedness of health in our global world is a lesson we must learn.

Another lesson that no one will quarrel with is that, however much international aid and however many volunteers—I, too, pay tribute to them—we parachute into a situation such as the one we have seen in west Africa, there can never be enough to replicate a basic health system that reaches into every village and community and is the absolute foundation not only of public health in normal times but of dealing with disease outbreaks. What we as a world do post-2015 in terms of the objectives for health and providing support for health systems will be tremendously important.

That will be shown in Sierra Leone because, as others pointed out, once Ebola is, we hope, no longer rampant—the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, rightly pointed out there is a possibility of it becoming endemic in the country—there will still be a tremendous specific health need left behind by the effects of the crisis. There will be the patients with malaria. We have seen a terrible spike in malaria deaths. There will be the women who died in childbirth because they were not able to get to attended facilities. There will be the health of the orphans left behind. There will be the vaccination programmes that have been interrupted. There will be a tremendous health need. As the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, said, it will be a test of us all that we do not walk away from that at the end of this process.

The other lesson that we can learn is that we can rightly be proud of the response of professionals in this country who have volunteered, of the British public, who have given more than £30 million to the Disasters Emergency Committee, of which I am a trustee, and the work of the agencies funded by that money, which goes far beyond medical treatment to provision of food and latrines for people who are in isolation, the care of Ebola orphans and safe burials. That is a tremendously important contribution.

We should also pay tribute to those in the affected countries in Africa. I will also be considering the work of Restless Development, the charity that my husband chairs, which has about 2,000 community volunteers in the field working on social mobilisation. The trust and behaviour change of communities that is needed is on a tremendous scale and does not come from lecturing by people from outside; it comes from the mobilisation of community leaders, religious leaders and individuals who are connected to their communities, who are trusted and who give the right messages and support people to change behaviours to protect themselves.

An understanding of the need to marry the command and control and international response with the grass-roots, culturally sensitive response of those on the ground, is something that we hope we can learn from this outbreak. I cannot finish without endorsing what the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, said about vaccines, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Kinnock, also referred. We have a market failure in vaccines and medicines for the poor. We cannot simply shrug our shoulders and say that the pharmaceutical industry as currently constructed cannot and will never produce the goods. We need to ensure, through government, philanthropy and voluntary organisations, that those goods are produced for the poor.