Doctor exposed to Ebola patient attacks 'utterly illogical' quarantine system

Source: Guardian

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“The ridiculous thing about this is the advice says once we are home we shouldn’t use public transport or go into crowded places, or if we do it should just be for short journeys of less than an hour, and yet they were quite happy to let us go home disperse from UK airports on the underground, on flights to Glasgow, which just makes a complete mockery of the quarantine arrangements,” Deahl said.

“It just begs the question whether they gave that advice because they didn’t want to spend the money on taking us home. It’s utterly illogical and I’d like to see someone at Public Health England try and justify and explain why – if they said we weren’t to go into crowded places or public transport once we were home – why people could use public transport to get from the airport.”

Deahl, from Newport in Shropshire, was one of 30 NHS volunteers to help tackle the Ebola virus in Sierra Leone. He flew back to Heathrow airport via Casablanca on Sunday night, sitting next to the nurse who has since been diagnosed with early stages of the virus.

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He also criticised the “totally inadequate” facilities for testing at-risk health workers once they landed at Heathrow airport, which he said increased the chances of cross-infection. He said nurses were herded into several overcrowded “tiny poky little offices” and had to wait up to an hour to be checked over. The temperature testing kits that health workers are given to take home had run out by the time he got seen, Deahl said. “The facilities for doing temperatures and the suite of rooms they were using were totally inadequate for the numbers coming through,” he said. “We were all crowded together and queueing together so given what’s happened the chances of cross-infection, just from that experience, were high – just from being herded together at Heathrow in a ridiculously small space.”

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Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/30/doctor-exposed-ebola-patient-utterly-illogical-quarantine-system