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Health and Social Care Bill

After our debate yesterday, I tried to work through some of these provisions looking at worst-case scenarios. One of the scenarios that came to mind was terrorism by releasing smallpox, the Ebola virus or some other contaminant in, for example, a building such as this—heaven forbid—and I wondered how we would cope with public health in that situation. Isolation involves the clinical management of a person who is already infected, whereas quarantine is used before you know whether the person has the infection, although he is at risk of getting it, and he is therefore in the phase where he has been exposed but it is not known whether he will develop the condition. It struck me that the term ““other suitable establishment”” might have to be flexible, depending on the place and the occasion. I completely understand the need for clarity in the definition, but I have a great deal of sympathy with the Government in their attempt to draft legislation to apply in the future to unknown circumstances with unknown quanta of risk, where something might have rapid effects. In framing scenarios in my mind, I was drawing on my experience of the release of some smallpox virus some years ago, when I happened to be a junior doctor working in the vicinity and one of the people had been transported by ambulance on my watch, which meant that we all had to be vaccinated. It was interesting even then, without any awareness of terrorism and so on. I see that the situation could rapidly become very complex, with the need to hold people in an area and not let them freely circulate or be transported elsewhere. One would have to make the best of what was available. With those caveats, I express a degree of sympathy towards the Government, although I think that it is important for the Minister to state clearly on the record the intentions behind this provision.