Article Text

Download PDFPDF
Responding to the tuberculosis risk of forced mass migration from Ukraine: a complex challenge with no single solution
  1. Pranabashis Haldar1,
  2. Lauren Ahyow2,
  3. Martin Dedicoat2,3
  1. 1 Respiratory Sciences and NIHR Respiratory BRC, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK
  2. 2 Tuberculosis Unit, UK Health Security Agency, London, UK
  3. 3 Infectious Diseases, University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust, Birmingham, UK
  1. Correspondence to Dr Pranabashis Haldar, Respiratory Sciences, University of Leicester, Leicester, LE1 7RH, UK; ph62{at}leicester.ac.uk

Statistics from Altmetric.com

Request Permissions

If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

Infectious diseases have played a major role in shaping our history—none more so than tuberculosis (TB), which accompanied the first humans out of Africa, and continues to cause the untimely death of more than 1.5 million people each year.1 The COVID-19 pandemic has provided a much-needed wake-up call to the global threat posed by infectious disease at a time of rising population density and mobility. Against this backdrop, the past decade has witnessed large scale population displacement in Europe and the UK caused by conflicts in Syria, Afghanistan and more recently, Ukraine. Since February 2022, over 13 million Ukrainians have been displaced, with over 8 million seeking refuge across Europe2—the largest and fastest mass migration since World War II. Pre-emptive planning of the urgent public health response to such events is usually limited, with reliance on existing and frequently overstretched healthcare services to support implementation. National programmes of targeted screening for active TB and asymptomatic TB infection (TBI) in migrants are an important, cost-effective element of the TB control strategy in many low incidence countries.3 This infrastructure is often leveraged to screen refugees and asylum seekers, however populations facing forced migration are more vulnerable, have a higher burden of prevalent disease,4 and present distinct challenges of access and engagement.

The Ukrainian refugee crisis poses a significant risk to …

View Full Text

Footnotes

  • Twitter @HaldarP1

  • Contributors All authors contributed equally to the editorial content.

  • Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

  • Disclaimer The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the NHS, NIHR or the Department of Health in England.

  • Competing interests None declared.

  • Provenance and peer review Commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

Linked Articles