187349 Lack of public health services and medical care for the unrecognized African refugee community in Israel

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Carrie Lee Teicher, MPH , Sackler School of Medicine, Tel Aviv University (School) and African Refugee Development Center (Work), Tel Aviv, Israel
The public health system in Israel is not equipped, via resources nor mandate, to assist the illegal African refugee population that is currently residing in temporary shelters in Tel Aviv. As of February 2008, there are currently over 800 refugees from Africa currently illegally residing in Tel Aviv, Israel. These men, women and children are refugees from several different war-torn regions in Africa. In Israel, they are not legally recognized, thus have no access to the public social welfare, public health or medical system. They all face assorted barriers to care, including a lack of access to the emergency medical hospital system, limited access to public health vaccination and infectious disease control/testing programs and minimal ability to freely move about the city. The local NGO that cares for the social, legal and medical welfare of the illegal African refugee population has limited funding and resources and thus needs to triage its resources to ensuring that there is shelter and food for the refugees, leaving limited to no funding to address their basic medical needs. Most the refugees come from areas with endemic tropical and infectious diseases, that with the resources found in the developed world, can be medically managed. However, though many of these screening tests and subsequent treatments are relatively low cost, the refugee population does not have access to these services. Additionally, the public health issues raised for the host community have gone unaddressed, especially in addressing the issue that many of the refugees are unvaccinated for infectious diseases (like polio, yellow fever, etc) that are endemic in the regions from which they originate. This work examines what it means in terms of public health and human rights to be living as an illegal refugee, without any resources, in a developed nation that does not have international NGOs, UN or government agencies allocated with the mandate of assisting refugee populations.

Learning Objectives:
1. Participants will gain the perspective of what it is like to attempt to negotiate a health care system as an illegal member of society and what negative health outcomes are the result from such exclusion. 2. Participants can expect to be able to identify and articulate how lack of access to health services and care affects the lives of African refugees and asylum seekers. 3. Participants will be able to list several barriers to care that illegal refugees face, prioritize how one can triage the health needs of the refugee community with limited resources and construct a plan that addresses the tropical and infectious diseases that are endemic in the refugee population, but at very low or non-existant prevalence rates in the host country.

Keywords: Refugees, Human Rights

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: Volunteer as the medical coordinator for ARDC (African Refugee Development Center), the local NGO that assists the refugee community whom I discuss
Any relevant financial relationships? No

I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.

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