NHS Ebola staff ‘insulted’ by UK travel ban

Volunteers’ anger at restrictions imposed on their return home from west Africa

THE GUARDIAN by Tracy Mcveigh                                                                                   Dec. 21, 2014

As the latest of the six British-built Ebola treatment centres in west Africa admitted its first three patients this weekend, some of the volunteer NHS staff working there over Christmas said they felt insulted by a draconian ramping up of the protocols they have been told they will have to follow when they return to the UK.

A British health worker puts on protective clothes at a Red Cross clinic in eastern Sierra Leone. Photograph: Baz Ratner/Reuters

Public Health England (PHE) has told the NHS personnel it is increasing restrictions on their movements when they return from the frontline of Ebola-infection, banning them from travelling on public transport for longer than an hour and increasing from two to three the number of weeks before they can return to work.

For Dr John Wright, a clinical epidemiologist from Bradford working at the clinic at Moyamba, Sierra Leone, which opened on Friday, it was a slap in the face for him and his colleagues.

“It’s a return to the ecology of fear that they insisted they were going to steer clear of,” he said. “No travel, no shared accommodation, no clinical work, a fever parole officer to report to daily. Why not issue us with plague masks and bells?

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