An ebola question

[miasmum]

I was listening on the Jeremy Vine show about the screening for ebola at the London airports.

Why do they not just impose a travel ban to and from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea?

[KateLMead]

That would be far too simple miasmum... Uman Rights? No "STUPIDITY"

[Kaz]

I think they ought to!

[KateLMead]

This and all parties apart from UKIP pretend to have this Islands interests and safety at heart. We have witnessed just
How efficient and genuine they are. Plenty of talking. NO ACTION. Luck of the Gods.

[cromwell]

I was listening on the Jeremy Vine show about the screening for ebola at the London airports.

Why do they not just impose a travel ban to and from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea?

Money?

[Suff]

The problem with imposing a travel ban is that people will then travel to countries which do not have a travel ban and take a flight from there. They will not book them as connecting flights and we will then be even less able to determine if they have come from the infected areas.

Then we will be hostage to the checks done by other countries. Already the press have started their rumour mill. Attacks on procedure because of handshakes. Ebola doesn’t work that way. Whilst a patient is ambulatory and not directly manifesting signs of Ebola, something they will not be coming direct from the infected countries, then a handshake will not transmit the disease. But the press will whip up any news they can.

Certainly the checks should be mandatory, but did the press not consider that we probably don’t have the staff in place today to deal with that right now? As the teams build out and process is more clearly defined, then things will change. Note that we still have not had one single case of Ebola come into the UK on a commercial flight. That despite the number of infected now reaching 9,000.

When this is all over, there will be some analysis of the procedures. Hopefully that will be made public, if the press are interested enough to tell us. Which they probably won’t be because what is the news value of a review after the whole thing is over. Unless, of course, there is at least one dead person and someone needs to be blamed…

[Workingman]

I was listening on the Jeremy Vine show about the screening for ebola at the London airports.

Why do they not just impose a travel ban to and from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea?

Money?

Partly, but the number of direct flights between the countries infected and the UK is minimal now that BA has suspended flights.

Emirates, Arik, ASKY, Korean Air and Kenyan Airways and Air France have also suspended flights and between all airlines nearly half the monthly number of flights, from the world over, have ceased.

I suppose that it is nigh on impossible to impose a lock-down on countries whose borders, in many places, are nothing more than a line on map, and which also have coastline. The wild animals of the area certainly winn not be bothered by a border.