New research published today in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health has debunked the popular perception that immigration is spreading diseases.
Researchers in New Zealand found that rather than putting locals at risk of infection, migrants were at risk of developing the disease themselves.
The finding suggests that border control should not be the focus of efforts at disease control.
It also blames the media for fuelling misconceptions in the first place.
Researcher Judith Littleton is from the Anthropology Department at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.
"We did an analysis of newspaper coverage and what we found was that when you had articles about TB, they were nearly always associated with migrants, the idea of migrants coming across the borders with what one person called 'third world diseases'," she said.
"Even one newspaper article, which was actually about a lawyer in Wellington who had TB - so it was about a European with TB - actually had a photo of a man from Hanoi with TB."
Associate Professor Littleton says that people are not receiving the health care they need and are also being stigmatised.
"It has a very dramatic or very direct effect," she said.
"People were worried about presenting for treatment or even for diagnosis, because they were worried about maybe coming into contact with immigration authorities.
"It also tended to drive people underground, and one of the things with TB is that you need to be able to do contact tracing, to trace whether anybody else has been infected."
In Australia, the incidence of tuberculosis is almost 20 times higher in foreign-born people than locals. Associate Professor Littleton says there is almost no transmission of TB from migrants to locals.
If anything, it is the migrants themselves who are more likely to develop the disease, or get it again, in their new country.
"What actually happens is that a lot of the migrant cases or individual cases or transmission is only within the household, or some specific ethnic groups who are living in extremely poor living conditions," Associate Professor Littleton said.
She says that means the focus of disease control should shift from the airport to the streets and homes of the community.
"It's not enough to just concentrate on border control, because for one thing, one in three people in the world are infected with TB," she said.
"It's the conversion of the infection to the disease, and that's actually happening in New Zealand, so that's about conditions here that aren't working well for migrants."
Source: By Australian Broadcasting Corporation
