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  • 2017-08-17 (xsd:date)
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  • Are Refugee Tuberculosis Rates in San Diego 'More Than 100 Times Greater' Than the National Average? (en)
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  • On 8 August 2017, right wing news site Breitbart.com published a story suggesting that residents of the city of El Cajon, California were in danger of contracting tuberculosis, based on a study of refugees to the U.S. published in 2013: From there it pivoted to the findings of a team led by Timothy Rodwell, an associate professor at the University of California, San Diego's School of Medicine. Rodwell and his fellow researchers examined the results of latent tuberculosis infection (LTBI) tests for refugees who moved to San Diego County between January 2010 and October 2012, the majority of whom came from the Middle East. According to the study, 823 of the refugees tested positive for LTBI, while another 14 had an abnormal result on radiographs that was consistent with active tuberculosis. Breitbart then surmised: That figure was based in part on the Centers for Disease Control's findings of 2.9 cases per 100,000 for 2016 in the U.S. Rodwell — who noted that no one from Breitbart.com contacted him prior to publishing its story — told us: Rodwell said that the site apparently took 14 (the number of cases consistent with active TB) and divided it by 4,280 (the total number of refugees involved in the study). That comes out to around 0.0032710. They then multiplied .0032710 by 100,000 (the standard measure for reporting incidence of disease in populations), giving them an incidence of 327.102, or 327 per 100,000: He also took issue with the site's extrapolation from his team's data: He also pointed out that testing positive for LTBI and having active tuberculosis are extremely different: Breitbart also neglected to mention that 489 (59 percent) of the refugees who tested positive for LBTI were offered treatment. The report by Rodwell's team stated that another 334 refugees diagnosed with the infection did not receive similar offers, mostly because they were fifty years old or older, in which case they were referred to local medical providers. According to the study, 373 refugees accepted the offer of treatment, with 219 of them (58.7 percent) completing it by the time it was published. Another 78 were still being treated at the time of publication, while 39 defaulted from treatment. A spokesperson for San Diego County, Craig Sturak, told us that between 2012 and 2016, resettled refugees accounted 4 percent of the county's active tuberculosis cases. Overall, the county reported a TB incidence rate of 8.0 per 100,000 residents in 2016, down .4 percent compared to 2011. While both the study and the Starbucks event were legitimate, their connection stopped there. One had absolutely nothing to do with the other except in the context of the commitment by the coffee company to hire more refugees and the hiring drive itself. (en)
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