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11.10 am
Mr. David Stewart (Inverness, East, Nairn and Lochaber) (Lab): My hon. Friend the Member for Stockton, South (Ms Taylor) deserves the highest possible praise for using her elevated position in the ballot for private Members' Bills to introduce this excellent Bill, which I fully support and endorse. My hon. Friend made a first-class speech, which was articulate and informative.
May I apologise to the House, as I shall be unable to stay for the wind-ups? I have a family engagement.
Few events in life can be more traumatic for parents than the death of a child, or the death an adolescent son or daughter. I speak with some personal experience, as 10 years ago, I tragically lost my nine-month-old son Liam, through cot death.
Over the years, I have met and worked with scores of bereaved parents. Support, understanding and counselling can, of course, help parents and children to come to terms with bereavement, but no one can answer the big question, "Why me?"
Ms Dari Taylor: My hon. Friend carefully and accurately says that the loss of a child would traumatise any family, but may I kindly ask him to extend that
comment to include young husbands, young wives and young brothers and sisters, whose families are equally affected in such situations?
Mr. Stewart: My hon. Friend makes a very valid point; we sometimes forget the wider family network, which is incorporated in the Bill.
The effects on parents of the victims of sudden cardiac death are no different whatever the age, and, as we heard earlier, it is the main cause of death in those aged under 35. We also heard that the condition kills between four and eight young people in the UK each week. The Medical Journal of Australia reports that one in 200,000 school or college athletes will die suddenly, most without prior symptoms.
There is much concern about risk factors. On 18 February 2002, the Medical Journal of Australia identified a few of the factors to which my hon. Friend referred earlier; they included family history, previous cardiac arrest and links to genetic mutations. In July 2003, the journal Heart reported survey evidence showing that 80 per cent. of sudden cardiac deaths in athletes occurred following, or during, vigorous exercise.
May I refer to an example that my hon. Friend touched on earlier? In 2001, in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Western Isles (Mr. MacDonald), a 24-year-old school teacher, Joanna Fotheringham, died suddenly in her sleep. The charity Cardiac Risk in the Young—about which we have heard so much today and which I fully support and congratulate on its work—led an excellent initiative with the Western Isles council and the Western Isles health board. They conducted ECG tests on 600 young people aged between 15 and 18. That was the first time in the UK that such a programme had been undertaken routinely for heart disease. The charity rightly wants British health authorities to back nationwide cardiac screening—albeit in a highly targeted way—such as that in Italy and America.
Alison Cox, the founder and chief executive of CRY said of the Western Isles scheme:
- "Our programme in the Western Isles aroused considerable media interest . . . with moving interviews with Alex Fotheringham"—
- "talking about the devastating impact on her family of Joanna's sudden death, and George Moodie, Joanna's headmaster on Lewis, explaining how the sudden cardiac death of a young and much loved teacher like Joanna affects the whole community".
Screening is vital. As we all know, national screening programmes are usually carried out following advice from the UK National Screening Committee. In 1996, the previous Conservative Government said that no new programmes could take place until the committee had analysed their effectiveness. Although the NSC rejected screening for sudden cardiac death in the young, the evidence base is being reviewed this month and I am sure that the whole House looks forward to a more positive response from the committee.
Why do I support the Bill? I believe that high-risk, targeted screening, not general population screening, is vitally important. I believe that an automatic right to screening for all relatives of people who have died from sudden cardiac arrest is crucial. Relatives will have a high motivation to participate, so such screening will be highly effective and efficient. As the causes of sudden death in young people have a genetic link, family screening is imperative.
This is a first-class, well researched Bill. My hon. Friend deserves congratulations on her initiative in introducing it, and I strongly commend it to the House.
11.16 am
Mr. Nigel Jones (Cheltenham) (LD): It is a great pleasure to support this important Bill, and I congratulate the hon. Member for Stockton, South (Ms Taylor) on introducing it, and on the huge detail that she gave us about the various conditions and treatments for which she wants screening to be available. I also congratulate her on the passion that she showed in her speech.
I am a sponsor of the Bill, and I suspect that the main reason why the hon. Lady invited me to be a sponsor is that I am one of the few Members to have had a heart attack. I do not recommend the experience, and I would like to help colleagues to avoid it if possible, so I thought it might be useful to the House in considering the Bill if I explained some of my first-hand experience of the conditions that the hon. Lady was talking about.
First of all, finding out that one has a heart problem is a gigantic shock, not just for the patient but for their family and friends, too. On 7 November 2002, I was suffering from what I thought was just a heavy cold. I had just returned home from one of those weeks in this place when there had been a lot of votes and, in the Lobby, everyone was passing on germs from all over the country.
After hours of coughing and spluttering, I started to have real problems breathing. I eventually told my family, "Call an ambulance, I think I might be dying". Gloucestershire ambulance service arrived very quickly to give me oxygen and the paramedics walked me out to the ambulance. I want to record my enormous thanks to the paramedics for their promptness and professionalism.
In Cheltenham general hospital I lost consciousness for a time. A little later, my wife was taken into a corridor and told to prepare herself for the worst. My heart was not pumping properly, and my lungs were full of fluid. The doctors thought that they were going to lose me. I cannot find words of praise sufficient to thank the people who treated me. However, suffice it to say that they managed, eventually, to drain the fluid off my lungs and to stabilize me. An hour later my wife, son and daughters were allowed in to see me and the look of relief on their faces will live with me for ever.
The following day, the cardiologist, Dr. Challoner, whom I have tasked with keeping me alive, told me that I had suffered a heart attack. What he actually said was that I had had a myocardial infarction, or MI, which is what doctors like to call heart attacks. I had suffered no pain, so in that respect I was lucky, but the evidence from the blood tests was clear—it was a heart attack.
The doctor had been keeping an eye on me since 2001, when it was discovered that my heart had an irregular beat—a condition called atrial fibrillation. I underwent an electrical cardioversion, which the hon. Lady mentioned, when, under general anaesthetic, paddles were used to stop and restart my heart to try to restore a normal heartbeat. When I woke up, I asked the anaesthetist whether the procedure had been successful. "No," she said, "we had six goes, but they didn't work." She added, "And you snore." That was a year and a half before the heart attack, but a week after my heart attack, I underwent an angiogram, which the hon. Lady described. It is a process where a tube is inserted into the groin and fed along an artery into the heart and, using a dye, it is possible to see the function of the heart and detect any problem. Normally, an angiogram is a 20-minute, procedure, carried out under local anaesthetic—not in my case.
During the angiogram, the doctor was surprised to discover that my heart attack had caused only a tiny amount of damage in a single vessel of a side artery. He said that he could not understand why I had been so ill, with just a tiny bit of damage. I was able to watch what was happening on monitors in the room. It was fascinating—but frankly, it would have been even more fascinating if it had not been my own heart that I was looking at. The 20 minutes passed. My cardiologist left the operating theatre. A nurse kept giving me a spray under my tongue to stop the pain. I told her that I had no pain. She seemed surprised. A second cardiologist arrived. After a certain amount of prodding, he told me that they were thinking of transferring me to Oxford, where they have better facilities. He pointed out that there were advantages, including an opportunity for travel. At that stage, I wondered whether I ought to consider a spot of praying. Anyway, after a total of two and a half hours, what I had expected to be a 20-minute procedure was over.
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