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Antonio Sparaco
Global Health Center Director, Trapani
Posters & Accepted Abstracts: J Pharmacol Med Chem
With the arrival of Covid-19 epidemic in the regions of southern Italy, the attention on the health of migrants from countries with strong migratory pressure has been amplified more and more. The interventions for the protection of public health have been reformulated also because the recent scientific evidence on the possible neutralization of the effects of vaccine by the new mutated viral strains are generating further worries among the population. The establishment of quarantine ships is helping to protect public health more efficaciously, acting as a filter for the resident population and ensuring more rational assistance to migrants arriving in the region. To safeguard national public health, the Italian Ministry of Health has entrusted the Region Sicily with the implementation of an epidemiological surveillance project of Covid-19 on the region and in other territorial contexts in Italy, to define the impact that the epidemic has on the foreign population. In this context, the Local Health Department of Trapani collaborates for the management and sharing of oropharyngeal samples used for the search for variants to identify new models of diffusion and reconstruction of samples of migratory flows. Moreover, the project provides of a training intervention aimed at the operators of the health authority. From the beginning of the survey of Covid 19 virus in migrants (November 2020), carried out by our department, there have been more than 5.467 swabs performed on migrants of which 110 were positive. In this regard, also the E.U. ICARE project continues to give an important support, for the sustainability of the actions both in procedural / instrumental terms and in terms of prevention and health care. In fact, during scheduled landings, the supply of rapid tests and the rapid execution of it, allows the immediate identification of positive subjects to Covid 19. On the other hand, when the landings of migrants arriving through the Mediterranean sea occur in a widespread manner and with few migrants, the greatest difficulty is the lack of prompt intervention for the execution of swabs.
