Medical exercise taking place by 22 Field Hospital at the Army Medical Services Training Centre near York, yesterday. Photo: PAThe British government is prepared to test travellers entering the UK for Ebola if medical experts say it is necessary, Chancellor George Osborne has said.
Amid calls for ministers to follow the lead of the United States – which is introducing screening at some airports – Osborne said the government was committed to protecting the British public from the disease.
“If the medical advice is we need to screen – it might well be – then we will absolutely take that action,” he told BBC News.
“We are not going to do anything that puts the British population at risk. Quite the opposite. The steps we have taken for several months now have all been designed to protect Britain from this awful disease.”
His comments came amid conflicting signals from Whitehall, with the Department of Health (DH) insisting it had no plans for screening, while Defence Secretary Michael Fallon said the existing government policy was in line with World Health Organisation (WHO) advice.
A statement on the DH website said: “The overall risk of Ebola to the UK remains low. Entry screening in the UK is not recommended by the World Health Organisation, and there are no plans to introduce entry screening for Ebola in the UK.
“This would require the UK to screen every returning traveller, as people could return to the UK from an affected country through any port of entry. This would be huge numbers of low-risk people.”
It is particularly difficult because the symptoms may not be obvious for a number of weeks after you actually catch the disease
Earlier, Fallon said WHO advice was that travellers from West Africa – where the Ebola epidemic has claimed thousands of lives – should be screened before leaving the area.
“The World Health Organisation advice is that it is better to screen on exit from a country to make sure that people who are leaving are not infected, rather than trying to screen people who arrive,” he told BBC News. “It is very hard to be able to track people who are changing planes and arriving by different means in the United Kingdom.
“It is particularly difficult because the symptoms may not be obvious for a number of weeks after you actually catch the disease. It is not straightforward.”
However, the chairman of the Commons Home Affairs Committee, Keith Vaz, said the government should not take any chances.
He called for tests at airports, train stations and ports as well as greater support for immigration officers to make sure they have the training to deal with the outbreak.
“With the greatest respect to the WHO, a virus doesn’t wait for a direct flight. There are various ways that it can arrive here,” he said.
Professor George Griffin, the chairman of the advisory committee on dangerous pathogens, which advises the government and Public Health England, warned that testing travellers for signs of fever was likely to prove ineffective.
He said that it would not have detected the first Ebola sufferer patient to be diagnosed in the United States – Thomas Eric Dun– who died yesterday in a Texas hospital.