Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the implications for his policies of recent WHO reports on Disease X.

Disease X is a hypothetical infection used to represent the knowledge that a serious international epidemic could be caused by a pathogen currently unknown to cause human disease.

Public Health England (PHE) has comprehensive systems in place to identify and monitor global outbreaks of infectious disease, including incidents where the cause is not identified or the outbreak is caused by a pathogen currently unknown to cause human disease such as World Health Organization’s hypothetical “Disease X”.

Robust risk assessment processes exist to review threats to the United Kingdom population. As information emerges appropriate mitigation strategies will be implemented to protect the health of the UK public. The PHE National Emergency Response plans exist to deal with such event and have cross-Government agreement.

The National Health Service-PHE High Consequence Infectious Disease (HCID) programme, initiated after the Ebola outbreak, has developed clinical and public health protocols and plans to provide a resilient HCID service for England. This will enable the NHS to deliver care safely and effectively for a wider range of known and unknown HCIDs.