Prague, March 21 (CTK) – Doctors registered 496 cases of TB in the Czech Republic in 2016, which is 22 fewer than in the preceding year, with foreigners making up 29 percent of the cases, and even 50 percent in the capital city, chief sanitary officer Eva Gottwaldova has told CTK.
The Czech Republic still ranks among the countries with a low TB rate.
Doctors say the number of foreigners coming to work in the Czech Republic without any health insurance has been rising.
“TB treatment costs from 60,000 to 300,000 crowns depending on how serious the disease is. The costs are paid by hospitals, which are bound by law to treat TB patients and keep them in isolation. The costs of the treatment of such patients in Czech hospitals exceed three million crowns a year,” Martina Vasakova, head of the Pulmonology Clinic in Prague’s Thomayer Hospital, told journalists.
Gottwaldova said the Health Ministry will recommend that general practitioners send the foreign immigrants from the countries with a high TB rate to special checkups to rule out the disease.
The measure is desirable in the case of foreigners coming from the countries where the TB rate exceeds 40 cases per 100,000 inhabitants, such as Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Moldova, Romania, Russia and Ukraine.
In the Czech Republic, the rate stands below five cases per 100,000 inhabitants.
Out of the 496 TB patients registered last year, 19 died.
A total of 146 cases (29 percent) were foreigners, mostly coming from Ukraine (41), Slovakia (21), Vietnam (20) and Romania (18).
