Malaysia to tighten health checks on migrant workers
Malaysia to tighten health checks on migrant workers
Agence France-Presse, Kuala Lumpur
Malaysia will tighten health checks on foreign workers who will be forced to undergo medical tests within a month of arrival and will be deported if found unhealthy, the health minister said on Thursday.
Migrant workers currently have medical checkups in their own countries before arriving in Malaysia, with a follow-up test a year later.
But Health Minister Chua Soi Lek said this time period needed to be shortened to protect the health of residents as it could allow possible infections to spread.
"This is to maintain the locals' health status," Chua was quoted as saying by the official Bernama news agency.
"We fear the current requirement to undergo medical examination after a year was too long because by then they will have close contacts with the locals and possibly they may have passed on infectious diseases," he said.
The early health checks are to start from next month, the minister said, adding the number of migrant workers infected with diseases such as hepatitis B, leprosy, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS was increasing.
"What is more worrying is the increasing number of foreign workers in Malaysia found to have contracted various diseases since several years ago which can harm Malaysians' health," Chua said.
Of more than 909,270 migrant workers examined last year by the Foreign Workers Medical Examination Monitoring Agency, 2.8 percent were infected with communicable diseases, up from 2.6 percent the year before, he said.
Indonesians were most often unhealthy, followed by workers from Pakistan and Myanmar, he said.
Chua said random health checks at entry points into the country found that 3.4 percent of migrant workers had health problems.
The tightening of medical checkups come as Malaysia, which has a chronic labor shortage, gears up for intakes of migrant workers from countries such as Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Myanmar and Vietnam.
The government also announced this week that some 60,000 refugees in Malaysia -- mainly from Indonesia's Aceh province, Myanmar and the southern Philippines -- will be allowed to work.
Malaysia on March 1 launched a controversial operation to round up, punish and deport hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, mostly Indonesians, following the end of a four-month amnesty.
This has left the plantation sector short of about 300,000 workers, with the construction sector lacking about 200,000. Malaysia is one of Asia's largest importers of foreign labor. Foreign workers, both legal and illegal, number around 2.6 million of Malaysia's 10.5 million-strong workforce.