Asked by: Lord Wills (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department for International Development:
To ask Her Majesty’s Government, in the last five years, what proportion of the UK’s aid budget was allocated to research into mesothelioma and other asbestos-related diseases.
Answered by Baroness Verma
DFID has not supported any research into mesothelioma and other asbestos-related diseases in the last five years.
Asked by: Lord Wills (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department for International Development:
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the incidence of mesothelioma worldwide, and of which countries are most at risk from it.
Answered by Baroness Verma
Data on mesothelioma deaths is collected by the World Health Organization (WHO) in the WHO mortality database. The WHO recognises that the global mesothelioma burden remains unclear, but the number of reported mesothelioma deaths and the number of countries reporting deaths has increased in recent years. The WHO, in collaboration with the International Labour Organization and other intergovernmental organisations and civil society, works with countries towards elimination of asbestos-related diseases, including mesothelioma.
Asked by: Lord Wills (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department for International Development:
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what research they are planning to fund in West Africa into the persistence of the Ebola virus in survivors, and into post-Ebola syndrome.
Answered by Baroness Verma
DFID is making UK-funded treatment facilities and laboratories available for research into Ebola survivors and existing DFID-funded research may provide relevant evidence. For example the Anthropology Platform is conducting research into survivors, and the WHO vaccine trial in Guinea is following up participants for three months.
To mitigate any risk of potential Ebola transmission, the UK is also helping the Government of Sierra Leone to assist survivors with access to healthcare, safe sex education and condoms, counselling and stigma reduction activities.