Latin America’s rise in tuberculosis linked to imprisonment rates Study warns region’s exponential rise in incarceration is fuelling the disease, with cases increasing by 19% between 2015 and 2022.
High incarceration rates in Latin America – the region with the world’s fastest-growing prison population – are exacerbating tuberculosis in a region that is bucking the global trend for falling incidents of the disease, experts have warned.
“Our main conclusion is that, in these countries, about a third of all tuberculosis cases since 1990 were associated with incarceration,” said the infectious disease specialist Dr Julio Croda, from the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz) in Brazil, one of the institutions involved in the study.
Clothes are hanging up to dry and there are a few red and white festival decorations on the walls] A study published in The Lancet Public Health journal has estimated that, contrary to previous assumptions, HIV/Aids is not the primary risk factor for tuberculosis in the region – as it remains in Africa, for example – but rather imprisonments.
The work is centred on six countries – Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Argentina, Peru and El Salvador – that, combined, account for 79.7% of the region’s tuberculosis notifications and 82.4% of its prison population.
