"Ebola has now claimed the lives of more than 5000 people in West Africa
as the current outbreak continues. Last weekend professor John Wright became
one of the first NHS volunteers to fly out to Sierra Leone to help fight the virus.
He's been sent to a town called Moyamba where he'll run a new Ebola treatment centre."
I was put in charge of setting up an Ebola hospital in Moyamba which is about a 5-hour drive
in-land from Freetown. And I spent the first three weeks working
with the Royal Engineers who were building a Hospital, setting up the hospital, getting
the drugs, laboratory support, the nurses, the doctors needed to run it.
And then about three weeks working in the hospital, looking after patients, experiencing
this very very strange, very infectious disease and learning how we could keep ourselves safe from it.
Everywhere you go there are security checkpoints.
Every building that you enter – there are security guards, but in place of guns they've got these
laser thermometers, and they point them at your forehead to check your temperature.
Any sign of fever and you don't go any further. The second thing is that at the entrance and exit
of every building there's giant vats of chlorinated water.
And then also working with community groups around in Moyamba trying to encourage changes
in behaviour around avoiding body contact, hand washing, fever monitoring, reporting sick patients.
The Bradford Institute for health research
was set up in 2007 in recognition for the need to boost medical research in the city.
And it was a collaboration between the University of Bradford and teaching the hospital here.
And it has been highly successful – we’ve grown our grant income from about half a million pounds
seven years ago from external grants, which is very low key, to about 10 million pounds
a year on medical research in the city. This has been a great brain game for the city
– we bring grants in, high quality research and high quality researches just for the city needs.
And it’s a great example of the partnership
between the university and the hospitals. It’s about 10 years ago the hospital became a teaching hospital.
And we were working in partnership with the University of Leeds
and the University of Bradford to expand medical school training
into Bradford. And at the time that allowed us to get some
resource about expanding our health research we had very little medical research going
on in the city. A lot of health need, but very little research.
So this is an opportunity to build a platform of research that will be attractive to researchers
in the future. So we looked around us, we didn’t have any
fantastic ivory towns full of geneticists and molecular biologists and all these sort of things.
But we did have this fascinating population in Bradford,
so it's a large city, it's multi-ethnic, it has considerable areas of deprivation and
it’s a fascinating area from a health perspective to study.
It’s like a TV series "Seven-up" or "Child of Our Time" you know.
We are just taking snapshots if they grow up.
For about 4000 children we're following them up every year, weighing, measuring, doing
skin print testing, measuring their breathing, measuring their brain development.
For most of the children we are just sitting remotely, we've got biometrical specimens,
genetic specimens and we got very detailed history from when mothers were recruited.
And *** following up linking to GP records and hospital records and school records to
find out what the early predictors of success and health are.
So 'Born in Bradford' is a medical detective story.
We're picking up the clues early on and trying to find out who've done it later on.
"Welcome to Sierra Leone and this ebola treatment centre paid for by British tax payers and
built by British Army engineers. It is hard to believe that just 8 weeks ago
this seven-acre site was scrubland. Now it's a fully functioning treatment centre.
Let me just show you around the place a little bit."
For me it was a very interesting experience. Socioculturally about how an epidemic can
completely take over a country. So this is an epidemic that has destroyed
a health service, destroyed the economy, destroyed the tourism industry.
There is nothing left but ebola in this country. It affects every way you go – there’s
sort of fever checkpoints every few miles on the road, there’s hand washing before
and after you go into every room, there is a no-touch policy so nobody touches anybody
which is very strange as human being.