By Dave Ranney
KHI News Service
WICHITA, Sept. 20
The past 20 months haven”t been easy on the Lyon County Health Department.
“I quit reading the blogs,” said public health nurse Renee Hively. “It just got to be too much.”
In March 2006, Tyson Fresh Meats plant in Emporia announced that it had hired about 70 refugees
all of them men
from war-torn Somalia. Within weeks, 70 become 400.
“They all have cell phones. They talk to family members all the time,” said Lori Torres, the department”s tuberculosis coordinator. “Word that there were jobs in Emporia spread like fire through dry grass.”
Torres and Hively soon learned that many of the incoming Somali workers were “Latent TB,” meaning they were carrying the germ that causes tuberculosis but were not yet infectious.
Tyson began sending the Somalis to the health department to be tested and treated.
“Somalis tend to travel in groups, so all of a sudden we had groups of 10 to 20
men in the lobby wanting to be tested so they could work,” Torres said.
But no one at the clinic spoke Somali and there was no money in the department”s budget to hire someone who did.
Torres and Hively discussed their experiences Thursday at the Kansas Public Health Association”s fall conference here.
The language barrier proved to be the first of many other hurdles:
* In Somalia, a person”s name is a combination of their parents,” grandparents” and great-grandparents” last names. Health workers found it was not unusual for many of the workers to have the same name, compounding the confusion created by the language barrier.
* Most Somalis
especially those born in remote villages
don”t know when they were born. They likely know the year, but not the month or day. Arriving in the U.S., those who don”t know their birthdays are assigned Jan. 1 and the year they were born.
It”s not unusual for more than one Somali to have the same name and the same birthday, creating a medical records nightmare.
* When filling out their health-history forms at Tyson, Somali workers routinely checked “no” for any and all ailments, fearing that if they admitted having high blood pressure, for example, they wouldn”t be hired.
* Though the Somalis would accept medications from the health department, they wouldn”t take them. “Where they come from, the government is trying to kill them,” Torres said. “So, here, when the government gives them a pill, they politely accept it because they don”t want to get in trouble. And then they throw it away.”
* Somalis were accustomed to seeing one person for all their health care needs
physical, dental and eye care and pharmacy. They struggled, Hively said, to understand why, in America, they needed to see more than one person.
* At first, the concept of appointments
being at a certain place at a certain time
was foreign.
* Somali workers are “extremely transient,” Torres said, and difficult to find outside of work.
The situation worsened Jan. 5 when a Somali worker died after being kicked by a cow at the Tyson slaughterhouse. An autopsy reveled he was “TB active,” meaning he was infectious.
“We got bombarded with calls,” Hively said. “The town was already in an uproar
and then this happened.”
Though articles in the Emporia Gazette curbed the rumor mill, the newspaper”s online reader reactions perpetuated falsehoods.
“There was a rumor that they were HIV positive, that they were raping white women at the car wash next to the Somali restaurant, that they”d been seen putting (uneaten) food back in the buffet at the Chinese restaurant.” Torres said. “And there would be things on the blogs like, “They should be sent back to Africa.””
“When people heard “TB,” everybody freaked out and thought they were going to die,” Hively said.
Slowly and with help from the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, the health department weathered the crisis.
“We”re doing fine,” Hively said.
The health department, she said, is tracking about 200 latent TB cases.
“A majority of these are in our Somali population,” Hively said. “We have two active, we completed one with medications and we”re working with the other. Typically in Lyon County we have one or two active cases, so we”re right on that marker, which I think is a tribute to our health department for getting the latent TB under control.”
One of the two active cases, she said, is not Somali.
“What I think this shows is that as our society becomes more diverse, it”s incumbent on all of us to recognize the importance of not labeling people, not making false assumptions and not interpreting actions in a inaccurate way,” said Shirley Orr, director of local health at KDHE.
Kiowa County Health Department director Mitzi Hesser addresses the Kansas Public Health Association fall conference Thursday in Wichita. Hesser won a Special Service Award for her work in the aftermath of the May 4 tornado that leveled Greensburg. She received a standing ovation. (Dave Ranney/KHI)
It was the second and final day of the conference and various association awards were also presented. Here is the list of honorees:
*
Samuel J. Crumbine Award
Kimber Richter, KU School of Medicine professor in the department of preventive health and preventive medicine;
*
Dorothy Woodin Award
Linda Shire, director at the Wilson County Health Department;
*
Virginia Lockhart Health Education Award
Paula Marmet, director of Office of Health Promotion at the Kansas Department of Health and Environment;
*
Jane Adams Award
Vicki Brunskill-Stus, regional HIV/AIDS case manager at the Crawford County Health Department;
*
Corporate Public health Service Award
South Central Kansas Coalition for Public Health;
*
Special Service Award
Patrick Hays, posthumous, former senior laboratory chemist at KDHE;
*
Special Service Award
Mitzi Hesser, director at the Kiowa County health department.
-Dave Ranney is a staff writer for KHI News Service, which specializes in coverage of health issues facing Kansans. He can be reached at
dranney@khi.org
or at 785-233-5443, ext. 128.