Objective:
Media portrayals of tuberculosis (TB) in New Zealand are of immigrants who enter the country with active disease and pose a threat to inhabitants, which fosters a popular perception that border control is the best and only response to disease control. This paper reviews both New Zealand and international data on TB rates, causes and transmission among migrant populations to elucidate the precise nature of the link between immigration and TB rates.
Methods:
Recent information from scholarly journals on immigration and TB was reviewed. Surveillance data from New Zealand and comparable information from other low‐incidence countries were reviewed.
Conclusions and Implications:
The importation of active TB is only a minor part of the total TB burden. While effective border control is essential, equally, if not more important, are the circumstances that promote the reactivation of latent TB infection in migrant communities, including migrants’ experiences in transit and after arrival, structural conditions, and personal characteristics. For sound prevention strategies, attention needs to be paid to the existence of transnational communities and the conditions for migrants, rather than placing a singular focus on place of birth.
The study showed that grandparents' complementary feeding practices in caring for infant grandchildren were influenced by upstream structural elements such as government policies related to welfare and pensions, employment, income and cultural knowledge. Frameworks that seek to achieve social justice and support cultural practices should be employed and promoted in the development of future policy and research in this area.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.