With 300 new infections per year, Milan has won the dubious distinction of cases of tuberculosis. Reason? The massive presence of immigrants: 70 percent of the sick, in fact, are of foreign nationality. The warning, in the day when we celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery of rifampicin - the number one drug for the treatment of tuberculosis - is the city Department of Health: disease incidence in Milan is 20-30 cases per 100 000 inhabitants, compared to the Italian average of 7-10. The triple. The three hundred new patients a year are a constant in the last ten years, but while up to 1999 to be suffering from tuberculosis were mainly Italians, now the trend has reversed. So Lombardy, which - remember to search the City Councillor Luigi Rossi Bernardi - "has played a crucial role in the discovery of new antibiotics," is one of the Italian regions most affected are between 1000 and 1200 new cases per year .
"Milan absorbs about 260 000 immigrants, of which 30-40 thousand are irregular, "says Councillor for Health Gianpaolo Landi di Chiavenna," are people who live in marginal, poor sanitation in situations that affect their health and that of citizens who come into contact with them " . They live in ten in a basement or in a camp of mud and garbage, and the result is that "more and more manifest forms of multidrug resistant tuberculosis drugs are difficult to monitor and treat." The confirmation of the data, specific Palazzo Marino, arrives Villa Marelli Institute Niguarda Hospital (pictured), the regional reference center for the treatment of tuberculosis, where you diagnose and treat about the 60-80 per cent of citizens. Here, too, immigrants are mostly from 2000, representing more than 65 percent of those infected. Of these, 65 percent had a regular residence permit and is in Italy for more than three years: nearly seven out of ten of them live in precarious situations. As for those who came later was even worse: four out of five conditions are at risk. For the Italians, however, the disease primarily affects adults over 35 years and older.
Although we are not the figures of the Seventies, when cases in the province of Milan were almost 2500 against the current 450, the picture is not comforting. "That's why - said Landi - one year ago, we off the project "Immigration healthy ', which involves a network of public clinics that carry out prevention and monitoring of the disease, then directing people to the departments of infectious diseases hospital in Milan. In a report prepared in 2008, the results of an investigation started about three hundred immigrants speak for themselves: 47 percent did not carry out medical checks in Italy and 54 percent even in the country of origin. As regards tuberculosis, 2.5 per cent has been cured after contracting the infection and 3.5 percent had a relative who is ill or has died.
"Most of the immigrants contracted the disease in Italy," explains and infectious Maria Rita Gismondi, head of the Laboratory of Clinical Microbiology, University of Milan and coordinator of project "Healthy immigration": "They come here healthy and contract the disease because of health conditions in which they live. The question, then, is not to question the country of origin, these people, but to do everything to spread the culture of prevention. "
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