THE FERGUSON CENTRE FOR
AFRICAN AND ASIAN STUDIES
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THE FERGUSON CENTRE FOR |
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Roehampton Conference Abstracts 4. David Richards (Open University, UK): Until 2006 David Richards was Director of the Ferguson Centre for African and Asian Studies, and a coordinator of the GIPSC Project. His numerous publications include Masks of Difference: Cultural Representations in Literature, Anthropology and Art (1994). He has conducted research in Nigeria and Morocco. Since 1994, the World Health Organisation has been involved in monitoring the spread of drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) in many countries worldwide, and in March 2004, Paul Sommerfeld, Chair of TB Alert, together with Dr. Mario Raviglione and Dr. Paul Nunn of WHO, published a global report on the spread of tuberculosis. Their findings make grim reading. The highest rates of MDR-TB are found in the former USSR, especially the Baltic States, and the report indicated that newly-identified areas with MDR-TB above 3% among new cases “pose great challenges to global TB control”. Although in the UK, MDR-TB cases have remained stable at around 1 - 1.5 % of cases for ten years or more, the global TB crisis has inflamed the national press and political debate on economic migration. While WHO experts agree that border controls have only a very small role to play in limiting the spread of the disease and that it is more effective to maintain TB services and improve access to them globally, freedom of movement within the expanded European Union and from countries outside the new EU borders have created a xenophobic public discourse in which migrants have been demonised as bearers of a new ‘plague’ infecting British citizens. With statements such as London 'is the TB capital of the west' (Aug 4 2003) the Conservative party has proposed controversial plans for health tests for all new asylum seekers. Shadow health secretary Liam Fox pointed to the "frightening problem" of soaring rates of ‘imported infectious diseases’. The Conservatives propose compulsory screening of all new immigrants and asylum seekers before they are allowed to stay in the UK, also arguing that ‘the tests would stop people coming to Britain simply for free health care, draining the resources of the National Health Service, as well as help cut levels of infectious diseases brought to the country from overseas’. “London is now the TB capital of the western world because we have such high rates coming in. We now have higher rates of TB in London than in places such as Azerbaijan. It's becoming quite a frightening problem.” Press responses from some quarters have systematically associated economic migrants and asylum seekers with the disease and in the process linked it with poverty, lack of hygiene, sexuality, and criminality, particularly in relation to Eastern Europe and Central Asia where drug resistant tuberculosis levels are ten times higher than in the UK. And yet, ironically, the history of the disease shows that TB is now being re-imported from endemic countries - often in Asia, Africa or Eastern Europe - as TB was exported from Europe to the rest of the world in the last century when 1 in 4 people in Europe died of the "white plague". Yet a more sinister element exists in the public responses to the disease
and its association with economic migrants. With MDR-TB presented as a
significant risk to public health, doctors and policy makers are increasingly
concerned about the issues raised by individuals who are ‘non-compliant’
with treatment. Dr Richard Coker This paper will discuss the history and morphology of the TB debate,
its association with economic migration, and the public discourses and
policy involved.
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