MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Increase in TB cases in Buenos Aires linked to sweat shops working conditions

Most of the labor in sweat shops comes from Bolivia and Peru

Tuberculosis cases in Buenos Aires City have increased 25% between 1985 and 2011 according to a paper presented by a Federal Attorney who links the surge to dreadful working conditions in many of the sweat-shops in the Argentine capital that employ cheap foreign labor.

 “The progressive expansion of TB in the City of Buenos Aires which has grown 25% from 1985 to 2011, compares with the 39% decrease at national level”, according to the report from Federal Attorney Federico Delgado and published in the government funded newspaper Pagina 12.

Many of the cases are victims of labor exploitation and are originally from countries where there is a high incidence of TB, such is the case of Bolivia, and “a clear symptom of exploitation relations under capitalism”

Apparently and according to data from the paper, 60% of cases reported in some of the main government hospitals and at the University of Buenos Aires Medicine School clinics, work in sweat shops, mostly clandestine.

Official health data in the last decade shows that the number of TB cases reported annually in the City of Buenos Aires and metropolitan Buenos Aires averages 2.000.

“Evidence indicates that there is a close addictive link between poverty, precarious living conditions, lack of housing, job instability which opens the way to such a phenomenon”.

“It is mostly victims who arrive in Argentina already infected and develop the disease in the miserable work and living conditions they are exposed to at the sweat shops”, such as poor ventilation, lack of proper food and adequate resting time.

“The slave work conditions also make difficult the access to medical attention and testing on time”.

Metropolitan Buenos Aires has a booming textile and garment industry but also many sweat shops, even in downtown Buenos Aires that take advantage of the undocumented and mostly illiterate workers that arrive to Argentina looking for paid jobs.