Health: Allergy (Science and Technology Committee Report)

My Lords, as this debate has shown, yet again, there is no subject on which there are not a number of people in your Lordships’ House who are highly expert—many, in this case, as a result of serving on the committee so excellently chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay. I bring a different expertise, which has been shared by at least one other noble Lord, that of a sufferer. Because one likes to excel in life, I was rather chuffed when I went into my doctor’s surgery three years ago and he said, ““My God, David, that is by far the worst case of hay fever that I have ever seen in all my years of practice””, and he packed me off to the Hereford Eye Hospital. I am half-way through a course of immunotherapy which is, so far, working for grass but not for tree. In order to be in your Lordships’ House this afternoon, I am on 20 milligrams a day prednisolone steroids—nasty stuff steroids, incidentally; 180 milligrams of fexofenadine, which is a strong antihistamine; hourly doses of sodium cromoglicate eye drops; four doses a day of antihistamine eye drops; nasal steroid spray; and piriton to send me off to sleep at night. So it is obviously not trivial going through all these treatments, especially if you still look like a living monster. I mention that not only to get the sympathy of the House, although that is always nice, but more seriously to make three points. First, the only reason why I am here this afternoon is that I am receiving treatment at Guy’s Hospital from Professor Chris Corrigan and his wonderful specialist allergy team. They gave me new heavy-duty antihistamines, which would not be known to many GPs. My GP is excellent and he had only just heard about them. It is only because I am able to receive that specialist treatment that I am not lying down in a dark room, moaning, at this moment. My second point is more important, goes to the heart of the debate and is about the importance we tend to attach to allergy. There is a feeling that allergy, even if you get it quite badly, does not rate highly in the league table of human suffering. It does not really matter and the health service should be concentrating on things that save people’s lives, rather than things that make their daily existence more comfortable. I make one or two points on that. A noble Lord, whom I will not mention because he is not in his place, quite often sits next to me in the allergy clinic because his life is threatened without immunotherapy. One bee sting could do for him. Therefore, he has to be there; that makes his treatment high-priority. These are, of course, terribly difficult questions of priority. In addition, this is something that you can start having at an early age and which, without treatment, can knock you out for four months of every year, right through your lifetime, until you die. Sometimes, quite seriously, you wish when you have it that you were dead. There is a case for priority to be given to that, even over things that are life-threatening but may only be so to people who will have relatively short spans of additional life if they are treated. There is a case to be weighed there. I pick up a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Taverne. A balance has to be struck in weighing risks. I had a first symptom-free period of eight or ten years when I was injected with immunotherapy by my GP. That was made illegal after one or two people had dropped down dead in doctors’ surgeries. Doctors’ surgeries are now much better equipped to cope if somebody keels over as a result of the treatment they are getting, and will be even more so when the Minister has finished his report. I am not quite clear, delightful though it is to be in the allergy treatment room, that sitting there for an hour after each jab is absolutely essential to my survival, and could not equally well be done in a doctor’s surgery, with greater convenience in many cases. To take another example of risk, there was a very good drug, from which many sufferers benefited, called Triludan Forte, which was banned after a few bad reactions in a million had occurred in the United States. There was a suspicion that it was associated with heart disease. It was worth the risk as far as I was concerned. We must not let risk stand in the way of important advances. Thirdly, in my experience, everything I have seen underlines the importance of the recommendations made by the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, and her committee in their excellent report, particularly about the availability of centres of excellence. I am at a centre of excellence. The lady sitting next to me travels for two and a half hours every week to go to that centre because it is the nearest to her. She sits there for two hours and then travels back for two and a half hours. She will have to do that for three years and more than 30 sessions. This is not a negligible price to impose. It is worth it for her, but it shows that, where possible, we should have centres nearer to people’s homes. She does not live anywhere very obscure. What would it be like if you lived, say, in the north of Scotland? I hate to imagine. The necessity of having these core places with the core skills available, led by a consultant but with the right team of people with the right experience, cannot be overestimated. Some disobliging things have been said—I understand that, having read it—about the Government’s response to the noble Baroness’s report. I did not feel that the response was wicked or dismissive so much as that the department felt that with so many things on its plate, understandably, it did not really wish to grasp this one. It was just a step too far—too much to take on. The same has clearly been true of NICE, as we have heard. No one seems to want to give this the small but decisive push that it requires to be treated properly. I say to the Minister and to the House only that there are hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of people like me who wish that they would.