RIYADH: The head of Environment Health at the Riyadh Mayoralty has said that 15 foreigners entering the Kingdom last year were found to have HIV/AIDS. Solaiman Al-Bathi told Al-Hayat Arabic daily that the mayoralty issues on average between 800 and 1,000 health certificates per day for workers at food facilities and in areas related to public health. “Since the beginning of the year we have issued over 72,000 health certificates,” he said. A recent report from the Licenses Administration showed that last year more than 164,000 foreign workers were given health certificates. “Fifteen persons were found to have HIV/AIDS, and they were prevented from working,” he said. Al-Bathi said that the process for obtaining health certificates would be made easier in the near future with the introduction of computerized systems to directly connect up with certified medical centers. “The system to link procedures through the Internet will be up and running soon,” he said. “The applicant will be able to use it to conduct all the procedures for the health certificate.” The most common reasons for failing to obtain certificates were health reasons, he said, citing “contagious viruses like hepatitis, or salmonella or parasites”. The head of the Executive Office at the GCC Council of Ministers of Health, meanwhile, has said that the rate of foreign workers with HIV/AIDS and hepatitis entering the Gulf had fallen by 75 percent. “Around two million foreign workers enter GCC countries per year, and round 25 percent of them have health issues,” Tawfeeq Khoja told Al-Hayat. “That means that some 200,000 workers arrive with illnesses, and that incurs financial losses on GCC countries, so we are working to introduce stricter medical examinations for foreign workers.” He said that the organization's figures and reports showed “certain difficulties” in preventing deported workers returning to the same countries. “Workers with illnesses manage to enter the countries at a rate of three percent, often using forged papers to get in under different names,” he said. Khoja said that three medical centers had been certified in each foreign city that sends workers to the Gulf, operating under the supervision of one center belonging to the GCC Health Ministers Council executive office. Consultants supervise quality control at the centers and link them directly with the executive office by providing reports on performance at the centers. “No foreign worker is permitted to enter GCC countries without a passport stamp from the certified medical center,” he said. The link up between the foreign worker centers, passports departments, the relevant countries, and the executive office center is done electronically and to exchange reports confidentially, he said. “It involves 11 countries, eight of them in Asia and three in Africa,” he said. “There are now a total of 250 medical centers.” The system enables the registration of “all types of conditions” that make workers unsuitable for employment, Khoja said, such as “sexually transmitted diseases, hepatitis and all infectious diseases and other conditions like diabetes, high blood pressure, heart conditions and mental illnesses,” and “thereby stops them from entering GCC countries”. He could not rule out, however, “gaps and holes” on the part of some medical centers in the countries from which the workers originate producing “erroneous reports”. “Special penalties have been introduced,” Khoja said, “for any certified center registering unsuitable cases in GCC countries. They include fines or closure for between three and six months. Should there be any repeat failure, they are removed from the list, and all the relevant countries are informed.”
