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Tuberculosis in Correctional Facilities: The Tuberculosis Control Program of the Montefiore Medical Center Rikers Island Health Services

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Steven M. Safyer ,
Lynn Richmond ,
Eran Bellin  and
David Fletcher
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Extract

“Recognizing that prisons disproportionately confine sick people, with mental illness, substance abuse, HIV disease among other illnesses; and that prisoners are subject to further morbidity and mortality in these institutions, due to lack of access and/or resources for health care, overcrowding, violence, emotional deprivation, and suicide.…(APHA) condemns the social practice of mass imprisonment.”

After decades of steady decline, tuberculosis has emerged as a significant public health threat in the United States. The rising rates of tuberculosis cases, an increasing proportion of which are resistant to standard chemotherapies, are linked to the many scourges threatening our communities: the explosion of poverty, drug use, violence, the HIV epidemic, and the concomitant rise in congregate housing including homeless shelters, residential drug treatment programs and incarceration facilities. Jails and prisons have disproportionately high rates of tuberculosis infection and have been implicated as points of tuberculosis spread and, as such, are a critical point for tuberculosis control interventions.

Type
Article
Information
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 21 , Issue 3-4 , Fall Winter 1993 , pp. 342 - 351
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 1993

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