Duncan Selbie's Friday message: 14 November 2014
Weekly message from the Chief Executive of Public Health England.
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On Monday and Wednesday I visited our teams who have got the enhanced Ebola screening programme up and running smoothly at Birmingham and Manchester airports, a tremendous achievement in such a tight time frame. I know how much work this has entailed from our earlier experience in London, and I cannot sufficiently convey my appreciation for all that has been done.
Poignantly, given the 100th anniversary of the First World War, teams from our Culture Collections at Porton and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute are to be congratulated on a landmark collaboration which has unlocked the history and genetic code of a strain of Shigella flexneri, isolated from WW1 soldier Private Ernest Cable. Their work will help researchers in their fight against dysentery, a disease that kills hundreds of thousands of children under 5 in developing nations each year.