00:00Tuberculosis outbreaks are causing concerns at several ICE detention facilities.
00:07A 45-year-old Ethiopian man died from TB while in custody at a detention center in Arizona.
00:14Other cases have been reported at facilities in Southern California, Alaska, Washington State, and Colorado.
00:21Straight Arrow News reached out to ICE, but we didn't hear back.
00:24And we spoke to a law professor who said the agency is responsible for detainees.
00:29The Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency is obligated to provide for the health care needs of anyone who is detaining.
00:38These are obviously not people who can go and seek medical care on their own.
00:43Tuberculosis kills one and a half million people worldwide every year, despite being preventable and treatable.
00:50TB has been around forever. I mean, since people were around, right?
00:56It's a very old disease. It is a bacterial infection. It is spread through the air by coughing, breathing, sneezing, singing, a lot of things.
01:05TB is preventable with a vaccine. That vaccine is often given to newborns in other countries.
01:11It's not a great vaccine. I would say that most people who die of TB were probably vaccinated, but they were vaccinated as a baby.
01:18The vaccine is not commonly used in the U.S., in part because America only saw 11,000 cases last year.
01:25TB is a disease of poor people, to be honest. And so as the socioeconomic status of a country goes up, the TB rates go down.
01:40And so here we never vaccinated, at least not regularly.
01:44Conditions inside immigration detention centers are often a perfect place for a condition like TB to thrive.
01:50Among the major risk factors, being close to someone who's infected.
01:55ICE actually has its own health unit called the ICE Health Service Corps.
01:59I think that there's a question about whether ICE is complying with its own detention standards.
02:03And that in and of itself might give rise to a viable lawsuit.
02:10I wouldn't hold my breath for that. Again, the standard is so low.
02:17Courts have been very reluctant to exert much oversight.
02:23For Straight Arrow News, I'm Lauren Kanin.
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