On any given day 590,000 individuals are incarcerated across the EU, yet surveillance and reporting for new infectious disease diagnoses are only required for tuberculosis.
On any given day there are 590,000 people incarcerated in prisons across the 28 member states of the European Union (EU), yet data on infectious disease burdens in these institutions is severely lacking.
As prison health care is being acknowledged more and more as an important element of public health, challenges such as poor monitoring systems, lag time on implementation of new programs, and a lack of information needed to introduce evidence-based decision-making inhibits progress considerably.
In a personal view piece published in
According to the authors, the complexity of health care and social needs among incarcerated populations are likely due to a combination of risk factors for infection and poor health. Some recognized factors for disease transmission include poor infrastructure, overcrowding, inadequate facilities, and delays in diagnoses, among others.
Surprisingly in the EU, surveillance and reporting on new diagnoses in prison settings is only available for active tuberculosis (TB). Estimates included in the report indicate that the relative risk of detecting active TB in prison is 10 times higher than in a community setting, with latent TB risks also higher in the prison setting.
Moreover, available data on people who inject drugs (PWID) reveal an association between infection with HIV and hepatitis C virus (HCV) and prison history with longer incarceration linked to a higher prevalence.
With evidence-based decision-making becoming more mainstream, prison health has remained marginalized. The European Centers for Disease Prevention and Control set out to create prison health guidelines developed from evidence-based medicine and literature reviews. The guidance was commissioned by Tavoschi.
Unsurprisingly, the guidance development process was hampered by the shortage of published data.
“Prisons are probably one of the most challenging environments for conducting scientific research because of access problems for external researchers, and other discouraging factors affecting research planning and management, including ethical issues,” the authors of The Lancet report note.
Key conclusions from the
“The delivery of health protection and harm reduction public health programs in prisons not only benefits the prison population but also can reduce the risk of transmission of some infectious diseases in the community,” Tavoschi and colleagues write.
The authors cite a study from Scotland, which showed that advocating for hepatitis B vaccination for incarcerated people has resulted in an increased uptake that has been mirrored in growing coverage among PWID outside of prison environments.
Additionally, recent modelling studies have consistently predicted a decline in the incidence of HCV in the general population following a scaling up of case findings and direct acting antiviral-based HCV treatment in prison settings, creating an attractive and cost-effective intervention.
As this report demonstrates, prison health is a critical portion of public health and it’s clear just how highly interdependent prison and health care services are. High quality health care in prisons cannot be offered without cooperation from the correctional system and the prisons cannot deliver prison services that meet international standards without good health care services.
Therefore, using standardized data collection tools in prisons would not only contribute to better estimates of disease burdens (both in the institutions and on a national and international level) and correlated health needs, but it would also allow for adequate resource allocation.
“Despite many remarkable improvements in equivalence of care during the 15 years between these events, much work remains to be done to ensure that prison health is truly seen as part of wider public health,” the authors conclude.
