Ebola

Kevin Brennan Excerpts

Monday 13th October 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right to say that we have fantastic research on the spread of infectious diseases at a number of institutions in this country, including in Liverpool, and we are not only using that research in the battle that we are leading in Sierra Leone, but making it available to partner countries leading the battle in other parts of west Africa. The advice that I get from my experts, from Public Health England and from the chief medical officer takes full account of the research done in places such as Liverpool.

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

In his statement, the Secretary of State said that the screening measures would reach 89% of passengers from the three affected countries; it is therefore hoped that one in 10 will self-identify. Will he tell the House the numbers that the estimate is based on, not just the percentage, so that we have an idea of how many people will be involved in these screening measures?

[Mr Hunt]

For the month that we looked at, September, we are talking about around 1,000 people arriving from the directly affected countries, which is about 0.03% of all Heathrow travellers for that month. It is important to say that the vast majority of those will be low-risk passengers, but those are the people with whom, initially, we would want to have a conversation, so that we could understand whether they had been in contact with Ebola patients or had been in the areas particularly affected by Ebola, and so that we could decide whether we needed to put in place tracking procedures to allow us to contact them quickly, should they develop symptoms.