Ebola

Lord Lansley Excerpts

Monday 13th October 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

The Under-Secretary of State for Health, my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea (Jane Ellison), has been in touch with Jim Wells in the Northern Ireland Assembly and she will take up that issue. The broader point that the hon. Member for North Antrim (Ian Paisley) makes is that there are many points of entry into the UK, and it is important for us to recognise that our screening and monitoring process will not catch absolutely everyone who comes from the affected regions. That is why we need to have other plans in place, such as the 111 service, and to have encouragement at every border entry point for people to self-present so that we can protect them better, should they develop symptoms.

[Mr Andrew Lansley (South Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

I welcome the Secretary of State’s statement to the House, and I am also grateful to the shadow Secretary of State for what he said. All Members share the Secretary of State’s admiration for the staff of the NHS and Public Health England who are assisting in the front-line treatment and care of those in west Africa. In that context, he is right to try to tackle the virus in west Africa, but this is not just about the availability of much better treatment facilities; it is also about working in the community in short order to try to stem the continuing transmission of the disease. Work has clearly been done on that; will he tell us how we might scale it up?

[Mr Hunt]

My right hon. Friend makes an important point. I discussed this with United States Secretary Burwell today. The US is piloting a programme in Liberia, and we are doing the same thing in Sierra Leone. We are both providing the same response, which is to tackle the disease at source. We know that, if we can get 70% of the people who develop Ebola symptoms into treatment and care, we will contain the disease. At the moment, the disease is replicating at a rate of 1.7, which means that every 10 people infected are going on to infect another 17 people. That is why the virus is spreading so fast, and we can halt it only if we get people into treatment very rapidly. Community treatment centres are therefore an important part of the Department for International Development’s strategy to help to contain the virus, and that is why we are supporting the development of 700 beds in Sierra Leone.