More secrecy in Michigan about TB rates in
resettled refugees there, by Ann Corcoran 10/17/16
It seems almost
every day that Breitbart
publishes a new investigative report on Tuberculosis in refugees arriving in
the US. I will bet every one of you, before Michael Leahy began his
series, believed that we screened TB and other infectious diseases out of the
legal immigrant flow to America—not so! Here
is Leahy’s latest on the state becoming the epicenter of
growing revelations about carelessness with refugee health screening.
The Michigan Department of Health and Human
Services, most county health departments in the state, and the local Michigan
offices of refugee resettlement agencies are hiding refugee latent tuberculosis
(TB) infection rates from the public. Michigan’s
culture of concealment stands in contrast to how several other states deal with
latent TB infection rates among refugees.
Signs and
symptoms to help you determine if someone close to you has TB: cough, afternoon
fever, night sweats, weight loss, blood in sputum.
As Breitbart
News reported, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS)
does not collect latent TB infection rate data from the county health
departments and local resettlement agency providers it hires to conduct initial
domestic medical screenings for arriving refugees, nor does it acknowledge its
clear legal obligation to do so under the Refugee Act of 1980.
“We do not have
that data,” MDHHS spokesperson Bob Wheaton told Breitbart News when asked for
data on LTBI infection rates based on the entire population of refugees
screened.
MDHHS has hired
several county health departments and, in some counties, private refugee health
screen services working in cooperation with local resettlement agencies to
conduct initial domestic medical screenings of arriving refugees. Under Centers
for Disease Control (CDC) and MDHHS guidelines, every refugee who completes
such a screening is tested for latent TB infection.
But MDHHS says
neither the counties nor the private refugee health screening services share
this data with them, and the counties and private refugee health screening
services who have the refugee latent TB infection data refuse to make that
information public.
In the case of
at least one private refugee health screening service, the Arab American and
Chaldean Council, which MDHHS has hired to conduct refugee health screenings in
Wayne County, Macomb County, and Oakland County, that data is also not being
shared with health departments in those counties. Providing that data to local
county health departments is a requirement of the Refugee Act of 1980.
[Too bad we don’t have a legal foundation
devoted solely to bringing lawsuits as the Refugee Act is being violated on a
regular basis—ed]
Continue
reading here.
Embedded are links to TB data from many other states. See our very extensive Health
Issues category with 318 previous posts about refugees, diseases and mental health.
https://refugeeresettlementwatch.wordpress.com/2016/10/17/more-secrecy-in-michigan-about-tb-rates-in-resettled-refugees-there/
1 comment:
Sad, when the disease can be controlled by antibiotics, that whoever's bringing in these refugees is not encouraging them to get screened and treated.
My mother once hired a yardman (native U.S. citizen, distantly related to me but not her) who had been exposed to TB and declined the antibiotics. About thirty years old, he started coughing while pruning a tree, fell out of the tree, and died in the road below our house before the ambulance arrived. Is that something Michiganians want to watch? If you do have to watch someone die coughing up blood, don't you at least want to know that s/he was offered antibiotics that would have prevented this, and refused to take them?
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