Working to avert a migrant health crisis
San Diego County and Mexico provide medicine and care to thousands in shelters.
SAN DIEGO — Two months pregnant, Jessica Mejia of Honduras received flu and tetanus vaccinations and prenatal vitamins in the health clinic at Tijuana’s El Barretal shelter Friday.
She was one of many in the 6,000-strong migrant caravan to get checkups, medications and even minor surgery from a growing set of services that added a mobile hospital last week.
It’s a far cry from the one medicine dispensary initially available to migrants who began arriving at Benito Juarez Sports Center in mid-November, said Jose Mateo, 30, of Guatemala.
“It changes everything in the sense that we have better treatment,” he said.
As the caravan of asylum seekers approached the border, many in Mexico and the United States were worried that such a large group would increase the odds of a public health crisis.
But Dr. Wilma Wooten, San Diego County’s public health officer, said the health services given in migrant shelters on both sides of the border provide an important point of contact to spot early symptoms of disease and separate those who are infected from those who aren’t.
Accessible healthcare inside shelters is an important part of keeping disease outbreaks from moving into the general population.
As of last week, workers have provided more than 5,000 medical consultations to migrants in Tijuana and Mexicali, according to Baja California’s health ministry.
A registry is tracking the health status of 45 pregnant women living in the shelters. Though the Mexican government has said rumors of a tuberculosis outbreak in the shelters are not accurate, nearly 3,200 are dealing with respiratory ailments, mostly colds and coughs.
The largest health threat has been a chickenpox outbreak that had infected seven people, according to the government’s update last week. At the request of volunteers, Dr. Adam Breslow, president of Children’s Physicians Medical Group in San Diego, sent 70 doses of chickenpox vaccine to inoculate children at risk of becoming infected.
And 600 doses of hepatitis A vaccine also moved south last week, sent by San Diego County’s public health department.
Wooten said a request for the doses came from the Baja California health department. Filling that order, she said, made sense from both a humanitarian and an epidemiological standpoint.
“It’s important to get the vaccines on the Mexican side so that we can protect people in terms of diseases that are preventable,” Wooten said.
Sending chickenpox vaccines south, Breslow added, is not just charity. His medical group has plenty of young patients near the border, and many are too young to be vaccinated.
“We have plenty of kids under 1 year of age who are not yet available to get the chickenpox vaccine .... By immunizing kids in Mexico, we’re also helping our kids as well,” Breslow said.
Though the Mexican government has not said much about the vaccination status of the migrants at the border, many present at the shelter Friday said childhood vaccinations are common in the Central American countries they came from. And many received flu shots in Mexico City.
Mejia, the expectant mother, said the best care she’s received so far has been at the end of the road. “It feels very nice to get this kind of attention,” she said.
Still, the likelihood of infectious disease increases the longer people stay in shelters, Dr. Robert “Chip” Schooley, chief of the division of infectious diseases at UC San Diego, said in an email.
“If one is actually worried about health risks related to the current border issue, it would make sense to enhance the pace of considering the claims of those seeking asylum in the U.S.,” Schooley said.