A TOTAL of 142 Filipino workers were sent home by Middle East countries in 2012 and 2013 for being unfit because they were found to be harboring infectious diseases.
X-ray findings upon their arrival in host countries show many of them have ailments.
The director general of the Executive Board of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Accredited Medical Clinics Association (Gamca), Tawfik Khoja, revealed that numerous cases of abnormal x-ray findings and infectious diseases like hepatitis B, HCV (Hepa C), and HIV were found on the Filipino workers upon their arrival in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman.
This prompted their employers to send them back to the Philippines, recruitment consultant Manny Geslani said.
He said a total of 50 cases of hepatitis B, 12 cases of hepa C, three cases of HIV and 77 abnormal x-rays were found on Filipino workers deployed to various countries in the Middle East.
The health ninisters of GCC countries were alarmed by the increasing number of Filipinos deployed to the Middle East testing positive for HIV and other infectious diseases, Geslani added.
In a related report, the Department of Health (DOH) said there was a 79- percent jump in the number of HIV cases recorded in January, compared with the same month in 2012.
The 380 new HIV cases recorded in January brought to a total of 12,082 the HIV-AIDS cases in the country, with an average of 12 new cases reported every day, the highest since the DOH started monitoring HIV cases in 2004. Among the new cases of HIVs patients, one out of every five is an overseas worker, or 20 percent of the total HIV-AIDS cases.
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