I HAVE had some quite ridiculous emails about Ebola.

It is a really horrible disease but we have to retain a sense of proportion.

Many more people will die of malaria this year than Ebola. And in countries like our own, with highly developed health services capable of isolating patients, we are not going to be prone to the spread of the disease like west Africa, where health facilities are rudimentary where they exist at all.

Ebola is relatively difficult to catch. You can’t catch it from food, water, or air. It is caught by direct physical contact with the body fluids of an infected person. The virus only appears in a person's bodily fluids after they already have symptoms, so a carrier can't unknowingly spread it before they feel sick.

The time from exposure to when signs or symptoms of the disease appear – the incubation period – is two to 21 days, but the average time is eight to ten days. I am confident that the constituent who emailed me to say that he had read on Twitter that the disease was being spread by zombies risen from their graves had been “tweeted” utter nonsense.

The irony however, is that victims become most infectious when they are dead, because fluids leaking from the body are by then turbocharged with the virus. The traditional west African rituals, where relatives wash a body prior to burial, have played a large part in spreading the disease. Additional contributors have been fear and distrust of officialdom, including medical assistance and advice.

Nevertheless, the outbreak in west Africa is already a global threat to public health and it is vital that developed nations like Britain take a lead in responding to the epidemic. To this end, on October 8, the Secretary of State for Defence announced that we will deploy our Armed Forces.

Britain will take a lead in the work to tackle the outbreak. At the heart of our package is the commitment to provide more than 750 personnel to help with the establishment of Ebola treatment centres and an Ebola training academy to train local health workers. We are deploying troops, helicopters and a ship to provide direct assistance and reassurance.

We have a comprehensive action plan and we have already committed to deliver more than 700 treatment beds and at least five new treatment centres in Sierra Leone. This is the key difference that Britain is making: providing the treatments centres and beds – the current problem is that there are so few places for patients to go.

We have made a major commitment of £100 million from our international aid budget. In addition to the beds and treatment centres, this includes spending £20 million to sustain healthcare operations on the ground; helping aid agencies working in Sierra Leone with £5 million to supply badly-needed supplies to medical staff, such as protective clothing, chlorine and sanitation equipment; and allowing health experts and advisers to give more assistance to the government of Sierra Leone. We have been working on these plans over the summer and they are now well advanced.

To provide reassurance at home, and on the advice of the Chief Medical Officer, we are implementing screening arrangements at the UK’s main ports of entry for people travelling from the affected region.

Enhanced screening will be implemented at Heathrow and Gatwick airports and Eurostar terminals and will involve assessing passengers’ recent travel history, who they have been in contact with and onward travel arrangements as well as a possible medical assessment.

Britain is doing its bit. We need to persuade others also to step up to the plate too.