London mayor admits health checks at UK airports are ‘far from perfect solution’ but says capital is well-prepared for outbreak

Boris Johnson has said there is little doubt a case of Ebola will come to the UK and this will most probably be in London.

The London mayor also admitted health checks at UK airports were a “far from perfect solution” and cautioned the government against seeming to “promise stuff that doesn’t really make any sense”.

As the outbreak continues to spread across west Africa, Johnson suggested the best thing the UK could do was to be prepared for a new case of the virus when it happens.

“I have little doubt that eventually there will be a case of Ebola in this country and probably this city,” he told the BBC’s the Andrew Marr Show. “All I can tell you is that to the best of my knowledge … we have fantastic preparations in London for this. We have very good healthcare in this city, considerably better, alas, than they have in Africa.”

David Cameron initially resisted the idea of screening for Ebola at key airports and ports, but soon afterwards he ordered health checks on passengers entering the UK from Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia, the three worst-affected west African nations, following a change in the medical advice.

Although there are no direct routes to the UK from these countries, people who have taken connecting flights will face questionnaires and medical assessments, but not temperatures checks as in the US.

The guidance changed a few days after a Spanish nurse became the first person to contract the illness on European soil while caring for two repatriated missionaries who had been working in west Africa.

But the screening has come in for criticism from some quarters, as incoming passengers may not yet display symptoms of Ebola when they are being screened.

Johnson added his voice to criticism, saying he understood “why people don’t understand” the new protection measures.

“You can’t blood test everybody coming into the country … I can only go on the advice I’ve been given and that is that although I think we are doing a lot more screening, we don’t think temperature measures alone will be of any use because you could after all be in the early stages of incubation of the virus and have two or three weeks to run.

“The idea of screening at airports is, I’m afraid, far from perfect as a solution. What you need to do is make sure people coming from the affected countries are properly screened, properly tested when they leave. They shouldn’t be allowed to leave if they have been in contact with people in one of the affected areas. And obviously we should be putting on preparations here.”

On Saturday, Dame Sally Davies, the chief medical officer for England, said it would not be surprising if there was a “spillover” of Ebola into the UK, adding that she would “expect a handful of cases in the next few months”.

Medical staff and the emergency services have conducted a disaster preparation exercise this weekend to prepare for a potential outbreak, with hospitals now on standby.

Earlier, Cameron promised steps were being taken to “keep our own people safe here in the UK”, adding: “What we do is we listen to the medical advice and we act on that advice and that’s why we’re introducing the screening processes at the appropriate ports and airports.”

Britain has also sent about 175 military personnel to Africa to help with efforts to contain the disease.

In a round of broadcast interviews, David Nabarro, the United Nations special envoy on Ebola, said the global authorities have given themselves three months to get the virus under control.

He said it was spreading “exponentially” across west Africa but there was a very good chance of meeting this target of seeing the number of new cases reduce week by week by next year.

Speaking on Sky News’s Murnaghan programme, Andrew Mitchell, a senior Conservative and former international development secretary, called on the world to line up behind the UN to tackle Ebola in Africa and increase its containment efforts twentyfold.

The UK has already been contributed significantly to the global Ebola fighting fund, but it will need to carry on taking a lead in Sierra Leone, he added.

“It is very important that the principal countries with historic links in the area are very fully engaged. Sierra Leone is a country with which Britain has very deep and long historic links, Liberia the same thing is true of America, Guinea has French connections.

“We need the EU and those three countries in particular to champion the effort inside these countries in west Africa … This is absolutely critical because this is a threat to all of us, it needs to be contained in west Africa. People are very frightened there. There is danger of significant migration in the region and wider than that and that is why containment is so important.”

He added that the reaction of the world to crises such as Ebola was “almost always behind the curve, too slow”, but that the international community was now doing the right thing of by rapidly increasing aid efforts in Africa.

Labour criticised Johnson for raising the possibility of a UK Ebola outbreak and failing to provide solid reassurances.

Luciana Berger, the party’s public health spokeswoman, said: “People don’t want to see politicians on TV speculating about an Ebola outbreak, before passing the buck. After the past week they want reassurance that robust preparations are being made. Boris Johnson should focus on explaining what plans are in place.”