MOSCOW, October 14 (RIA Novosti), Ekaterina Blinova - As British health officials expect a "handful" of Ebola cases to reach the UK in the coming months, Heathrow airport has started screening passengers arriving from countries struck by Ebola for the deadly virus.
Screening will start at Terminal 1, before being extended to other terminals, Gatwick airport and Eurostar by the end of the week," the BBC reports, adding that almost one thousand people from West African states affected by Ebola came to the UK in September.
In accordance with the new measures, passengers arriving from Ebola-stricken countries will be identified by Border Force officers and then screened by nurses and consultants from Public Health service of England. Any passenger suspected of having Ebola will be sent to hospital.
"Passengers will have their temperature taken and complete a questionnaire asking about their current health, recent travel history and whether they might be at potential risk through contact with Ebola patients," the UK health secretary Jeremy Hunt said as quoted by the Guardian.
Although about 89 percent of passengers from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea will be screened at Heathrow according to the health official, travelers arriving from West Africa through indirect routs will not be screened.
The media outlet points out that the Immigration Services Union (ISU) is expressing concerns regarding the new procedure and insists that all passengers should be screened for Ebola immediately after they have exited the aircraft, not at border control.
"They are asking passengers who believe that they may have been in contact with an infected persons to self-refer. They have to present themselves to the Public Health England individual who is located behind the arrivals control, some 300 or 400 hundred meters behind and around a corner, not even immediately in line of sight. You have to actually go and seek them out," says Lucy Moreton, ISU general secretary, as quoted by the Guardian.
It should be noted, that some British health experts predict that the benefit of the screening measure will be "very small." The Telegraph cites Dr. Ron Behrens as saying: "In the early stages, Ebola can be indistinguishable from the flu, but it can also have aspects of other winter viruses like colds and norovirus."
"These diseases usually develop differently over a few days, but in a situation where a screener only gets one chance to decide whether a passenger is an Ebola risk, other winter diseases will probably be mistaken for Ebola," Dr. Ron Behrens added.
The expert warned that the procedure could cause disruptions to "large number of people."
However, according to the UK health secretary Jeremy Hunt, "the public health risk in the UK remains low" and all the measures undertaken by the UK health care officials "offer the correct level of protection."
