Bangla workers' health under watch

Government confirms that strict health screening is made on Bangladesh workers following reports that half of the adult population of Bangladesh are TB carriers.

Labour Minister, Jean François Chaumiere explains that the recruitment firms deals with all the formalities. “Health tests for Bangladeshi workers are conducted in their country before they are sent abroad. Once the health test exercises are completed, the recruiting firm sends the health certificates to the Mauritius Ministry of Health. The MOH then issues a provisional health clearance certificate. This will authorise the workers to enter the country, but they will have to undergo a series of health tests to confirm that they are healthy. These tests include HIV/AIDS, chest x-rays and others,” he says.

The Bangladeshi press reports that BRAC health programme executive Dr Fahim Ahmed Chowdhury said that though such a large number of Bangladeshi people are infected, very few of them carry active germs. Bangladesh ranks sixth among some 22 countries having the highest number of TB patients in the world. Every year some two million people die of the deadly disease across the world.

This was revealed at a roundtable held on Sunday at the National Press Club jointly organised by Health and Environment Journalists' Forum of Bangladesh (HEJFB), National TB Control Programme and BRAC Health Programme.TB control programme manager Dr Nazrul Islam lamented that negligence on the part of many doctors in southeast Asian countries might be responsible for increasing the number of TB patients. If proper dose of medicines is not administered, TB germs become medicine-resistant, he pointed out.

Though TB was discovered some 127 years ago and drugs for its control were invented 65 years ago, one person is infected by TB each second across the world and one dies of it every 15 seconds.

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