The UK Government has announced screening of passengers at the two main London airports, Heathrow and Gatwick, and the Eurostar rail terminal in London.
Flights from the worst affected countries tend to arrive at Paris and/or Brussels and passengers can then easily make their way to London via the Eurostar rail link.
One or two passages from a substantial article in today's Daily Telegraph are worth reproducing here.
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When SARS – severe acute respiratory syndrome – appeared in Asia in 2002, we were told that it had a 25 per cent chance of killing “tens of millions”. There were calls for borders to be locked down, and new arrivals showing symptoms to be locked up. But despite a spike in sales of surgical masks, and the hurried cancellation of thousands of holidays to Hong Kong and Thailand, the disease ended up killing only 775 people worldwide.
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It was a similar story in 2009 with swine flu. The chief medical officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, warned that 65,000 Britons could die, and the government duly spent more than £1.2 billion to prepare for the viral apocalypse. Yet while the disease was incredibly contagious, infecting millions worldwide, it turned out to be relatively mild. In Britain, only 457 people died – a significant number, but 25 times fewer than the 12,000 who are carried away by normal seasonal flu every year. To make matters worse, some experts later claimed that the £424 million spent on stockpiling 40 million doses of Tamiflu had essentially been wasted: its average effect, they said, was to shorten the disease’s duration from seven days to 6.3 (a finding which its manufacturer, Roche, disputed).
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Ebola’s strengths are, however, outweighed by its weaknesses. If you get it, you’re in very big trouble, but the odds of that are quite small. It is not, unlike the pathogens of our worst nightmares, airborne: it is spread via infected bodily fluids, which have to enter the body via the eyes or mouth or a cut or wound. Moreover, it is quite fragile, meaning that it does not survive long outside of its host – and can be defeated by the simple act of washing one’s hands.
As a result, the “R0” figure of the current outbreak – the technical term for the number of further victims that one sufferer can be expected to infect in turn – is somewhere around 2. That makes it a much slower spreader than Sars, smallpox or the strain of Spanish flu that killed tens of millions of people in the wake of the First World War.
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Daily Telegraph
It's worth noting, that the British nurse who was repatriated to the UK having been infected by Ebola in Sierra Leone, made a full recovery.
William Pooley plans return to the fight against Ebola in Sierra Leone