§ Lord Morris of Manchesterasked Her Majesty's Government:
What response they have made to the representations by Professor Michael Banner, a senior Government adviser on vCJD, on the 170WA Department of Health's attitude to and support for the vCJD Incident Panel, and to his allegation that Ministers have been misleading the public on the risks of vCJD; and what action they will be taking. [HL583]
§ Lord Hunt of Kings HeathA response to Professor Banner's representations has been made through a letter of 21 February 2001 from the Chief Medical Officer. Professor Banner is a recently appointed Chairman of a sub-committee; he is not a member of the main Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee (SEAC), which advises the Government on vCJD and BSE.
The letter from the Chief Medical Officer points out that the panel was established to advise on incidents involving the potential transmission of CJD or vCJD through clinical interventions. The role of the panel as a sub-group of the Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens (ACDP)/Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee (SEAC) Joint Working Group, is to advise health authorities on the appropriate action to be taken on specific incidents involving clinical interventions on patients who went on to develop CJD or vCJD.
SEAC at their meeting on 28 November were informed about the key elements of the strategy to protect patients against possible vCJD risk that was to be announced on 4 January 2001. The extract from the SEAC public statement describes this discussion as follows:
"The Committee were informed of the Department of Health's strategy to combat the theoretical and presently unquantifiable risk of person to person transmission of vCJD via surgical instruments. A major initiative had been launched to improve standards of washing, decontamination and general hygiene, earlier identified by the Committee to be key steps in reducing risk. This would take some time to yield results. In the meantime, single use instrument sets for tonsillectomies were likely to be introduced in the first instance.
The Committee welcomed the overall risk reduction strategy and the advances being made on decontamination. The committee also endorsed the concept of using tonsillectomy as a pilot scheme to see how single-use instruments would work in practice. In addition, the Committee recommended that the introduction of single-use instruments for other higher risk procedures should not be abandoned; that instrument labelling and tracking should be improved; that the monitoring of decontamination procedures should be both frequent and robust; and that it would be desirable for the reforms outlined to encompass private and military hospitals as well as the NHS."
171WAThus, the strategy itself was broadly welcomed by SEAC, the parent committee. The announcement on 4 January 2001 drew on the public statement of SEAC.
The Government value the work that the panel is undertaking and are allocating appropriate resources to enable it to fulfil its remit.