Richard Harrington – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Home Office
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Richard Harrington on 2014-06-25.
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps UK Visas and Immigration can take to prevent no cases of Ebola reaching the UK.
James Brokenshire
The UK does not specifically screen pre or at entry for Ebola.
Public Health England has assessed the risk of importation of Ebola in the UK
as very low. It is extremely unlikely that an outbreak of Ebola would occur in
the UK even if there was to be an imported case, as there are factors operating
in West Africa which would not be seen in the UK. The outbreak in West Africa
is driven by person to person spread in the absence of any infection control
precautions. Human cases of Ebola virus disease have never yet been exported
from an outbreak zone to a European country.
All UK ports have systems and plans for dealing with issues of public health
concern. However, they all require that the public health system is firstly
notified of the arrival of someone with a suspected disease of concern. Crew
are trained to do this by their respective companies and an example of the type
of guidance that they work towards can be found on the International Air
Transport Association (the international airline trade body) website at:
https://www.iata.org/whatwedo/safety/health/Documents/health-guidelines-cabin-cr
ew-2011.pdf .
At all UK ports, there is a system for routing reports, produced by the
commander of a craft, to a local health protection team who are available on a
24/7 basis throughout the year. Health protection teams have generic
responsibility for managing incidents of public health concern in all settings
including our ports. They will then take the lead in managing the incident from
a public health perspective with the NHS being responsible for the provision of
healthcare.
The International Health Regulations (IHR), which entered into force on 15 June
2007, require countries to report certain disease outbreaks and public health
events to WHO, including Ebola.
