UK UNiversities on alert of EBOLA Outbreak

Universities UK, the umbrella body that represents vice-chancellors, has written to every university giving detailed guidance on how to deal with an outbreak. The decision was made to send out the guidance because universities are expecting thousands of new students to arrive from West Africa.

While the three countries which have seen the largest number of Ebola cases – Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone – have hardly any students enrolling at UK universities, Nigeria – which has had confirmed cases – is the fourth largest supplier of international students to UK universities. In 2012-13, the latest year for which figures are available, a total of 9,630 were enrolled.

A spokesman for Universities UK said: "The issue is very much on universities' radars. We circulated to universities the publicly available guidance on the topic."