A SCOTTISH farm in my constituency had the dubious honour of being the source of the world鈥檚 first major milk-borne epidemic of Escherichia coli O157 in the mid-1990s. Current thinking is that this particularly nasty form of food poisoning can be spread by contact with animal faeces (快猫短视频, 21 September 2002, p 11). As the current season of pop festivals, countryside holidays and rallies is upon us, visitors and farm animals clearly ought to be kept apart. I asked health ministers what the government was doing about this.
Hazel Blears, the public health minister, replied that the Department of Health is attempting to improve both public and medical awareness of this infection and how best to avoid it. The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) alerts farm workers to the prevalence of E. coli O157 in animals and what they can do to prevent its spread. The HSE also runs a public awareness campaign on the risks it poses. Guidance is available for teachers supervising educational visits to farms and on the recreational use of the countryside. She added that, in a recent report, a task force on E. coli O157 advised anyone providing animal pastures for recreational uses to:
鈥� Keep farm animals off the fields during and for the three weeks before recreational use
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鈥� Remove any visible droppings, ideally at the beginning of the three-week period
鈥� Mow the grass, keep it short and remove the clippings before the fields are used for recreation.
A full report is available at . Blears added that the UK Zoonoses Group monitors the implementation of the task force鈥檚 recommendations.
Clearly, public gatherings should not be allowed on agricultural land unless stringent precautions are taken.
LADY AMOS, who recently succeeded Clare Short as International Development Secretary, is a lawyer with close connections to South Africa and an excellent working relationship with Nelson Mandela. Like Short, Amos is concerned that the world鈥檚 poor should have access to cheaper drugs. Certainly Short did much ground-breaking work with other European Union countries to ensure a flexible and constructive approach in negotiations on trade-related intellectual property rights (TRIPS). So far, though, negotiations have been bogged down by problems with the World Trade Organization (快猫短视频, 14 June, p 29).
In response to concerns raised by developing countries about the TRIPS agreement, the government set up an independent UK Commission on Intellectual Property Rights (CIPR) to look at how international agreements can take account of the needs of developing countries. Of course, access to medicines is a matter of life or death, intellectual property rights are not. The WHO recognises four key factors: reliable health and supply systems, sustainable financing, affordable pricing and rational selection, and use of existing drugs. The government is working on all these issues, and since 1997 has committed 拢1.5 billion to strengthening healthcare systems in developing countries. It has also committed $200 million to the Global Trust Fund to fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.
The CIPR completed a wide-ranging report in September 2002. The government鈥檚 initial response to the recommendations on health issues is that public funding for relevant research should be increased and that countries should adopt policies to improve developing countries鈥� access to medicines. I am told that the government will be responding further later this year.
