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.