Listeria: Contaminated Sandwiches

Philip Hollobone Excerpts

Monday 17th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

Yes, of course. Millions of meals are served in NHS hospitals each year. While we regret any death, especially a death that could have been avoided, the overall food in hospitals absolutely is safe.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

The NHS is a pioneer of and, increasingly, an international authority on the new science of genomics. Will the Minister confirm that without this NHS expertise, the source of the outbreak would not have been identified nearly as quickly and that we could well have been looking at far more deaths than in fact occurred?

[Matt Hancock]

My hon. Friend makes an incredibly important point—even more than he says. Without genomics, which the UK is the world leader in, it would have been impossible to link the different listeria deaths. They would have looked like individual cases in separate, individual hospitals. It is only because through genomics it could be worked out that the exact strain of listeria was the same in cases in different hospitals that we could then work out that there must have been a factor at work that was not internal to the hospital. When it was then identified that the food provider provided food to many different hospitals, that link could be made, too. Science and scientific progress are saving lives here.