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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsHow the coronavirus outbreak could hit refugees and migrants
The New Humanitarian
The healthiest and wealthiest are the ones that tend to migrate. The ones left behind are poorer and sicker.
By Eric Reidy
27 February 2020
...Over the last week, cases of the illness known as Covid-19 have escalated dramatically in Iran, and new infections linked to the cluster have emerged in more than half a dozen other countries in the region including Iraq, Afghanistan, and Lebanon.
At least 12 million refugees and internally displaced people (IDPs) live between Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Turkey countries linked to Iran by either frequent travel, irregular migration routes, shared borders, or all three. Iran itself hosts nearly one million refugees, mostly from neighbouring Afghanistan, and an estimated 1.5 to two million undocumented people.
...Dr. Adam Coutts, a public health specialist at Cambridge University who focuses on the Middle East, said refugees are especially vulnerable to the coronavirus or other diseases, due to high geographical mobility, instability, living in overcrowded conditions, lack of sanitation and WASH (waters, sanitation and hygiene) facilities, and lack of access to decent healthcare or vaccination programmes in host communities.
...The Syrian government and Russian airstrikes have systematically targeted hospitals in Idlib, and displaced people are sleeping without shelter in the streets, in olive groves, or in overcrowded camps that often lack clean water, according to Leyla Hasso, communication and advocacy supervisor for the Hurras Network, a Syrian aid group. It will be a disaster if we have coronavirus in northwest [Syria], Hasso told The New Humanitarian. ... Health crises have been an integral part of the Middle Easts conflicts and the displacement crises they have caused, Jawad said. He pointed to the outbreak of polio in Syria and Iraq in 2014, and the surge in cases of the so-called Aleppo Boil a parasitic illness spread by sand flies and its spread to neighbouring countries after the beginning of the civil war in Syria in 2011.
More here
https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/news/2020/02/27/Coronavirus-Iran-refugees-IDPs-Italy-Europe-disease
jimfields33
(15,450 posts)Whats going on now? What fixes are happening? What measures are taken by those countries to not have this happen. If a story like this can be written then a story about what they are doing can be written.
in2herbs
(2,942 posts)exposed to C-virus thru contact with Border Patrol and all other support employees. We must be vigilant in monitoring the health of these caged children and the caged adults.