Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Many of these questions are quite sectoral or scientific. I will answer the ones I can and then hand back to Dr. Holohan and Dr. O'Flanagan.

Exit screening is in place in the airports of the three most affected countries. Of course it is never possible to be sure that it is 100% up to scratch; that is the nature of these things. So far the only airport in Europe that has decided to carry out entry screening is Heathrow, which has direct and connecting flights to the region. However, it is something we need to keep under consideration.

The general WHO advice is not to do it on the basis that people who are asymptomatic - a person is asymptomatic for 21 days by and large - will not show up. What will show up are many people with coughs and colds and other illnesses, who have a temperature, but not Ebola. The only real benefit in it might be contact tracing. We need to keep it under consideration. To date, the advice is not to do it and to assist with the exit screening rather than doing entry screening in other airports. Even in the UK, although it is being done at Heathrow, it is not being done at any other airport. For the ports there is a protocol and I can send on those details.

The advice for the public is important. The HPSC website is very useful in this regard. The aid workers have all been told to register with their local public health department and all the numbers are there. They are told how to monitor in the first 21 days. For other people, the website states, "If you have had no contact with Ebola patients or articles potentially contaminated by them then you do not need to take any precautions as you are not at risk". However, if a person has been in contact with Ebola patients and in contact with potentially contaminated items, the website recommends that a person becoming ill within 21 days of return from the region "should contact your doctor for assessment and let him/her know of your recent travel history". What is envisaged in the guidelines is that a person would contact, presumably by telephone, his or her doctor who can then follow the protocol and assess if the person needs further action.

The IMO statement, which is in front of me, questions the wisdom of advising patients displaying Ebola symptoms to visit their GP. The guidelines do not state "visit", but state "contact". However, that may need to be made more clear lest there be a misunderstanding there. I can clarify that the guidelines do not suggest that people visit their GP. They suggest the circumstances under which they should make contact with the public health doctors or their GP.

Deputy Catherine Byrne asked about specialised units outside a general hospital. I do not fully know the answer to that question, but I imagine the reason they are in a major hospital is that they would need close access to other hospital facilities, such as ICU, radiology and laboratories. Without that there would be all the risk of transferring a patient and his or her samples to and from a hospital.

Deputy Conway's question related to the disposal of garments. That certainly could arise if we had a confirmed case. That relates to the issue of category A waste. I might let the CMO speak on that because he has been doing some work on that today.

Deputy Kelleher asked about other parts of the country. We will be asking hospitals to identify which isolation bed they will use if they suspect a case. All the acute hospitals would have isolation facilities. To the best of my knowledge, none of them would be up to the level of the national isolation unit, but that is the nature of a national isolation unit; it is at a different level. It is the kind of thing of which each country - or each state in a large country - would have only one.

I will also ask the CMO to speak on the issue of aerosol transmission. GPs obviously would not be doing aerosolising procedures in their surgeries, but there are other ways to create aerosols as the Senator pointed out.

Deputy Healy asked about the different patient scenarios. There are many different scenarios. When we had the emergency task force meeting two weeks ago, we started to come up with different scenarios. All sorts of scenarios could arise and we have gone through some of them. Again, I might ask my colleagues to comment on them further. There is obviously a huge difference between somebody who we know has a confirmed case of Ebola who is brought into the country and a suspected case that may just turn up somewhere.

We have had a couple of them already.