Lord Patel
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Ebola
Lord Patel Excerpts(9 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Patel (CB)
My Lords, I join other noble Lords in praising our volunteers who are currently working in west Africa, and also our Armed Forces who so rapidly constructed the first hospital in Sierra Leone. I congratulate our Government on their rapid response once it became obvious that this Ebola infection was out of control.
There is a lesson here. Infections will continue to come—that is the history of developing viruses in that area. Humans have been infected by four strains of Ebola virus so far, and there remains only one strain that has not yet infected humans but has already been found in pigs in the Philippines. If it goes from pigs to humans, it might become even worse. Marburg virus is just waiting on the sidelines.
What can we learn from that? To control infections we need good health systems and that has been the major failure. The current health systems in west Africa are not adequate and for all the investment we made in AIDS, we have not hitherto helped build good health systems. To control infection we also need to identify and care for patients. We are now beginning to grasp that by building hospital facilities but for Sierra Leone we will probably need 4,800 beds. Currently they have 236. Secondly, we need treatments such as vaccines or drugs. Vaccines are in development; the first is being trialled in Mali and two more—one developed in Canada and another in the US—will start trials soon, but it will be months before we know whether they are effective. There are drugs in development, and I hope that our Government, through Porton Down laboratories, are supporting trials of some of the drugs that are produced by our small biotech companies. Drugs might not directly kill the virus, but they may stop the chain process of replication, so I hope our Government will support that.
I congratulate the Government on their initial effort. We have not yet begun to control this infection, and yesterday’s news of Sierra Leone having 30 corpses appearing in one small area which was supposed to be free of Ebola proves the point.