According to Dr. Zohar Mor, adviser to the Health Ministry's chief of public health services for TB and HIV/AIDS, "the rise in morbidity is explained among other things by identification of TB through X-rays and medical tests among refugees incarcerated at Saharonim Prison, while such identification has not been initiated in other sectors of the population."
Mor discussed the issue earlier this month at a conference of the Israeli Society for Parasitology, Protozoology and Tropical Diseases.
The Health Ministry currently funds treatment for TB and HIV/AIDS only when the carriers are pregnant and for six months after they give birth. Children are also eligible if they have an insurance policy through the Meuhedet HMO.
This week, in a prelude to the new treatment program, the Health Ministry approved the first study of its kind on the files of asylum seekers and labor migrants treated in clinics in south Tel Aviv and Ichilov Hospital.
Mor said there was no intention to deduce that these groups are spreading the diseases in Israel, and that research from other countries "does not indicate a danger of infection of the local population by infectious diseases more common among refugees." Rather, the diseases spread mainly within the community of migrants, he said.
In June 2009, an interministerial committee was set up to consider granting rights to medical treatment to all non-citizens in Israel. The committee is reportedly likely to recommend such treatment for a limited period.
Physicians for Human Rights says morbidity from the diseases in question is far lower than the Health Ministry's numbers indicate. According to figures from the clinic the group runs for refugees in cooperation with the Israel Medical Association, over the past two years, 122 people have been documented as HIV carriers, only 1.19 percent of all refugees treated at the clinic. Since the clinic was established in 1998, it has reported a total of 215 AIDS cases, out of 25,500 patients.
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