Words by Smiley Team
The international medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has begun working in Southwest Florida to assist migrant farmworkers who are particularly susceptible to contracting COVID-19. MSF is responding to COVID-19 around the world and has response teams in Florida, New York City, Puerto Rico, New Mexico, and the Navajo Nation.
Working in Immokalee, Florida MSF is assisting on a public health education campaign and is supplementing local testing efforts. It is also providing non-COVID-19 medical consultations through community-based mobile “virtual” medical clinics.
“Immokalee is a community where as many as 15,000 to 20,000 migrant farmworkers continue to provide essential labor during this pandemic despite having a high risk of contracting COVID-19 due to crowded living conditions and limited ability to prevent infection during the course of their work,” said Adi Nadimpalli, a doctor working as MSF project coordinator in Florida.
MSF is working in close collaboration with local partners and over the last three weeks, MSF has conducted public health activities in Spanish, Haitian Creole, and English to promote healthy behavior and social distancing.
MSF has also run five mobile clinics where it has tested 126 people, with significant support from the Healthcare Network of Southwest Florida. While the majority of the test results are still pending, initial results from the first clinics show a high positivity rate, indicating ongoing community transmission and the need for more support.
Dr. Nadimpalli also noted that these initial clinics have shown that there is a strong interest from community members for testing. While there is a desire for testing by the community, accessing tests and the personal protective equipment (PPE) required to operate clinics is challenging, not just for MSF, but also for other organizations in the area as well, said Dr. Nadimpalli.
“While confirming more positive cases might sound alarming, the fact is persistent testing and ongoing health education is the only way to break the chains of transmission and stop this outbreak,” said Dr. Nadimpalli. “Testing should be accessible to every person at a convenient time and place, in their native language, and in a safe environment.”
In addition to COVID-19 testing, MSF is providing free tablet-based telemedicine consultations for unmet general medical issues in private kiosks, as part of the mobile clinics. MSF depends on volunteer doctors from around the country to provide the remote medical consultations in English and Spanish, and they hope to soon add Haitian Creole.
“The mobile clinics provide a safe space for the community to ask questions and receive accurate information to reduce stigma and rumors around the pandemic,” said Maria Plata, MSF health promoter. “Many farmworkers in Immokalee work long hours and around six days a week. They can’t afford to take a day off to visit a clinic, so we are bringing the clinics to them.”
MSF first learned of the concerning situation in Immokalee after being contacted by CIW, a human rights organization with a long history working in the community. Since the start of the outbreak, CIW has called for specific public health interventions and policies to control the outbreak and reduce community transmission, such as increased access to free COVID-19 testing, affordable health care, and isolation facilities.
“Testing has increased in bigger cities, but we’re going to have to ramp up testing right here in Immokalee in order to control the spread of the virus and meet the needs of the community,” said Dr. Nadimpalli.
You can find out more about MSF’s work relieving the COVID crisis here
By Ellen Jones
