Kuwait City: Kuwait's Ministry of Health (MoH) is working on making medical centres examine expatriate workers – namely Africans and Asians – in their respective countries, especially after detecting 1,271 cases of infectious diseases from seven of those countries after labourers arriving were re-examined in Kuwait.
Responding to a parliamentary inquiry concerning licensing centres to examine expats before coming to work in Kuwait, Health Minister Shaikh Dr Basel Al Sabah said the MoH urged Kuwaiti embassies abroad to use the unified GCC e-medical test system as well as re-examine expats prior to granting them residency visas in Kuwait.
The MoH later clarified that the cases of infectious diseases mentioned by Shaikh Basel were detected in 2017-2019, and not 2019. The ministry also stressed none of the cases mentioned were still in Kuwait, as those diseases had been detected prior to issuing their residency visas and they were immediately deported.
Shaikh Basel had indicated that MoH plans to adopt new medical tests for those workers and demand medical reports from visitors from countries connected to the e-system, adding that centres violating the conditions will be penalised and removed from the lists of accredited centres, Kuwait Times reported.
The minister also disclosed that there was a rise in various infectious diseases in 2017 including 838 cases of AIDS, malaria and hepatitis C & B. "We detected 222 tuberculosis, 145 hepatitis and one AIDS case from Bangladesh; 173 TB, 58 malaria, 32 hepatitis C, 26 hepatitis B and eight AIDS cases from India; 52 TB, 29 hepatitis B and 21 hepatitis C cases from the Philippines; 20 TB and two hepatitis B cases from Sri Lanka; nine TB, four hepatitis C, three hepatitis B and one AIDS case from Egypt and finally two TB, one hepatitis B and one hepatitis C case from Pakistan," he explained.
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