Analysis of the increase in the number of tuberculosis cases in recent weeks has not shown any connection with refugees from Ukraine. According to the State Institute of Public Health, the sick foreigner had relations with the Czech Republic before the start of the Russian aggression. The number of detected cases increased by about 46 percent, from 57 to 21 April.
Number of tests decreased in 2019
The State Institute of Public Health reported an increase in the number of cases in late April, and later detailed the information in a press release Tuesday. “Detailed findings on the origin of the samples (…) indicate that if they are from foreign nationals, in most cases they are patients who had a relationship with the Czech Republic before 2022,” he said in a press release.
During the analysis, experts from the National Reference Laboratory for Mycobacteria examined each sample sent and determined which patient it was. They then compared this to a sample size from the past few years, which showed a decline in the same period from 2019 to 2021 compared to the previous two years. More samples were then tested in the second half of the year.
“While we were unable to accurately identify the cause of the decline in testing, which occurred in 2019, and the increase returned only in late 2021 and 2022, it appears that this decline is related to the continued decline in the incidence of tuberculosis. in the Czech Republic and including measures against the spread of the coronavirus,” The head of the laboratory explained in a press release Věra Dvořáková.
There is one case of illness for two thousand runaway women
The exact number of tuberculosis cases reported back to the register; the lab did not provide data over the past few weeks, according to the institute. Institutions can thus only rely on year-to-year comparisons of the number of samples sent to national reference laboratories for confirmation.
According to estimates by the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control, based on data from the World Health Organization, one in every two thousand displaced women from Ukraine can be estimated to have one active case of the disease. For men over the age of 65, there is one case per 1,600 people and for children under the age of 14 it is one in five thousand. About 307,000 refugees obtained visas in the Czech Republic.
Foreigners make up about a third of cases in the long term
In the Czech Republic, children were required to be vaccinated against tuberculosis in 2010, vaccination was discontinued due to the small number of cases as well as significant side effects. Only children from high-risk environments are vaccinated, such as newborns to mothers from countries with a higher incidence.
In 2021, 221 cases of the disease were detected in the Czech Republic among people born in the Czech Republic and 132 in cases born abroad, 35 of which were in Ukraine.
In 2019 and 2020, there were about four hundred cases per year in the Czech Republic, and in 2017 there were more than five hundred. Foreigners make up about a third of cases in the long term, most often men who go to work in the country. Since 2017, there are about 30 patients from Ukraine per year. In recent years, Ukrainian children have been vaccinated directly in maternity hospitals; by 2020, about 89 percent of them received the vaccine.
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