Over the past year, at least seven children have died from diseases including influenza while being detained by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency. Infectious disease experts at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) called for protections like influenza vaccinations to prevent serious outbreaks.

“Detention centers have become tinderboxes for infectious-disease outbreaks,” warned Mark Travassos, MD, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at UMSOM and a pediatric infectious disease specialist in the UMSOM Center for Vaccine Development and Global Health (CVD). In a commentary published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Travassos and UMSOM Pediatrics-Internal Medicine Resident Carlo Foppiano Palacios, MD, said that it is not a surprise that thousands of detained migrants and asylum seekers have been quarantined because of influenza, mumps and chickenpox outbreaks.

Read more here: https://www.medschool.umaryland.edu/CVD/News-and-Events/2020/UMSOM-Pediatric-Infectious-Disease-Experts-Sound-Alarm-Over-Risk-of-Outbreaks-in-US-Border-Detention-Centers.html