This is an article that is mostly about money and aid agencies, but it interested me because I didn’t know that TB was prevalent in the Syrian refugee population flowing into surrounding countries.
It reminds us that we are taking refugees into the US with Tuberculosis and then we, US taxpayers, pay for their treatment.
Watch this incredible film from a few years ago where refugees for the US and for Australia with multi-drug resistant TB are being prepared by the IOM for resettlement. We first became aware of the TB issue among Burmese refugees in our earliest months of writing RRW in 2007 when the Allen County, Indiana Health Department was overloaded with expensive TB cases, here.
From Aidspan:
An expression of interest for a $10.18 million regional initiative to develop a harmonized response to a TB crisis among Syrian refugees scattered across neighboring countries was rejected by the Global Fund.
The pitch was determined ineligible because it was submitted by a cluster of UN and international agencies led by the International Organization for Migration (IOM): a violation of the eligibility requirements for regional proposals that limit regional organizations to those that are legally registered entities that are not UN, multilateral or bilateral agencies.
[….]
In submitting the proposal, IOM and partners the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the World Health Organization, the UN Development Program and the national TB programs in Syria and six of its neighbors, aimed to develop a coordinated response to the widening TB burden among Syrians displaced by four years of conflict.
[….]
The regional TB initiative would have primarily directed funds to support national TB programs in Syria’s neighbors, either in service delivery to the refugee populations or technical assistance to the workers within the health system. Part of the problem is that the TB burden in Syria is higher than in its neighbors; Jordan, for example, was on track for TB elimination but its prevalence rate has trended higher due to the influx of Syrian refugees.
Another problem is that countries now hosting the influx of Syrian refugees have made clear that their communicable disease strategies — and attendant budgets — did not contain provisions to respond to the health needs of refugee populations. Iraq, itself undergoing yet another security crisis and a widening of its own TB burden, has made abundantly clear in conversations at the highest levels that there is just not enough money to diagnose, and treat, the refugee TB caseload.
See our health issues category with more information on refugee health and TB by clicking here.
Obama will soon be announcing how many Syrians we will be resettling in your towns and cities. I have wondered what is holding up the process and assumed the delay was due to security screening, but perhaps there are some health issues causing the hold up.