Ebola comment: Will screening at UK airports work?
Release Date 10 October 2014
The UK is to begin screening some passengers who have travelled from Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea for signs of Ebola virus disease. Dr Ben Neuman, a virologist from the University of Reading, examines the Government's decision.
"There is not 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. Screening sounds like a good idea at first, but it would be difficult to put an effective Ebola screening programme into practice. Checking passengers arriving from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea for fevers is a reasonable precaution, but most people who are well enough to travel on a plane would pass the new screening measures regardless of whether they were infected.
"Even for experienced doctors, Ebola is a difficult disease to detect. The first few weeks after infection, a person would not normally have any external signs of having Ebola. Early-stage Ebola cases could only be detected by an invasive blood test, and even that might fail if the person has very recently contracted the virus. The only surefire way to keep Ebola out of the UK is to stop it at the source - by measures like providing new hospitals and the people needed to mount a joined-up public health response in west Africa."