[ 2014-10-10 ]

Ebola crisis: disease may already be in Britain as man dies on business trip
Ebola may already be in Britain, it was feared on
Thursday night, after a businessman who had
travelled to Macedonia became the first Briton to
die from the disease.

Macedonian officials confirmed that the
57-year-old, who has not been named, had been
suffering from fever, vomiting and internal
bleeding and that his condition had deteriorated
rapidly.

"These are all symptoms of Ebola, which raises
suspicions with this patient," said Dr. Jovanka
Kostovska of the health ministry's commission for
infectious diseases.

A second man, 72, who had travelled from London
with the victim on October 2 has also been
isolated and the hotel they were staying in the
Macdeonian capital of Skopje has been sealed off.

Sampling has been sent to Germany to confirm the
cause of death but the disease has an incubation
period of up to 21 days, which means the dead man
could have been infected in Britain.

Officials said he had not travelled to any country
caught up in the outbreak before arriving in
Macedonia, but he may have been making his way to
Nigeria.

Before his death, the victim had been complaining
of a severe stomach ache and had stayed in his
hotel for three days. At around 3pm yesterday he
was taken to hospital, but he died just 90 minutes
after being admitted.

The ambulance crew who took him to hospital have
also been isolated.

Elsewhere in Europe, a Prague hospital said it was
testing a 56-year-old Czech man with symptoms of
the Ebola virus, while the health of an infected
Spanish nurse worsened in Madrid, where a total of
seven people are in isolation.

On Thursday Downing Street announced that enhanced
screening will be brought in at the London
airports of Heathrow and Gatwick and at Eurostar
Terminals.

The Government, which has up until now insisted
additional checks were not necessary, changed
guidance following new advice from the Chief
Medical Officer, Dame Sally Davies.

Under new guidelines, people travelling from
Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea will be
questioned about travel arrangements and recent
contacts. They may also face medical checks.

A Downing Street spokesman said: "These measures
will help to improve our ability to detect and
isolate Ebola cases. However, it is important to
stress that given the nature of this disease, no
system could offer 100 per cent protection from
non-symptomatic cases.

“It is important to remember that the overall
risk to the public in the UK continues to be very
low, and the UK has some of the best public health
protection systems in the world with
well-developed and well-tested systems for
managing infectious diseases when they arise.
Contingency planning is also underway including a
national exercise and wider resilience training to
ensure the UK is fully prepared.”

Dame Sally said that 'further measures' were
necessary to protect the public.

“In view of the concern about the growing number
of cases, it is right to consider what further
measures could be taken, to ensure that any
potential cases arriving in the UK are identified
as quickly as possible.

“We remain alert and prepared, should an Ebola
case be identified here.”

However Britain is not yet following the lead of
America and South Africa by bringing in
temperature checks to detect passengers suffering
from fevers.

And experts warned that passengers are unlikely to
be truthful if they had visited infected areas.

Professor David Mabey, a physician specialising in
infectious diseases at the London School of
Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said he believed that
questionnaires asking passengers about their
recent travel, were a waste of time".

He said: "I think people will lie. They don't want
to be subjected to the inconvenience. Why would
people tell the truth?

"If last week your aunt died of Ebola but you feel
fine, are you going to be honest when you get to
the airport and risk being detained and missing
your holiday?”

Professor Julian Hiscox, from the Institute of
Infection and Global Health at the University of
Liverpool, said public information was key to
prevent the spread of Ebola.

"What we need to see is information handed to
people as they step off planes and a phone number
people can call if they start to develop
symptoms.

"The main thing is not to panic about this or to
drive people coming to the UK underground.”

Prof David Evans, Professor of Virology,
University of Warwick, said that enhanced
screening of inbound passengers was the most that
can be done 'to balance practicality and
effectiveness with the need to reassure the UK
public that their health is being protected.'

However Dr Ben Neuman, Lecturer in Virology,
University of Reading, said: "I don't think there
is a strong scientific case that airport screening
will help keep Ebola out of the UK, but it’s a
step that will reassure some people."

Professor Peter Piot, who was part of the team
that identified Ebola in 1976, said that more
European cases were ‘unavoidable’

The Foreign Office said it was still working to
confirm that the men were British.

On Thursday night former foreign secretary David
Miliband said there is no question that the West
has been slow in its response to the Ebola
crisis.

Mr Miliband, who is in Sierra Leone with the
International Rescue Committee which he heads,
called on the "big guns" of the world to lend more
support.

"There's no question that there's been a
tardiness, a slowness, a lateness of response,”
he told Channel 4 news.

Dr Marc Sprenger, director of the European Centre
for Disease Prevention and Control, said current
models predicted between 500,000 and 1,500,000
cases in West Africa by the end of January if no
action is taken.

He said while official figures put the number of
cases so far at around 8,000, in reality the
collapse of West African health care meant the
true scale was unknown and could be two-and-a-half
times higher.

He told the Telegraph that good exit screening
from affected regions was higher priority than
entry screening at British airports.

He said: “First of all you need to have exit
screening. If exit screening is well done, and the
flight is not that long, then in fact it’s not
necessary to have the person checked on arrival.

But while it may be simple to screen flights
coming direct from West Africa, he said it would
be far more difficult to track and screen
connecting passengers.

And he warned they were of limited use. He said:
“You only catch the people who have fever but a
lot of people are in an incubation period and will
develop later and become infectious.”

Source - The Telegraph

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