At the Miral Migration Reception Center in Velika Kladusa, two migrants were infected with malaria, Dnevni Avaz learned, adding that cases of AIDS, hepatitis B, C, tuberculosis, itching, have been reported so far.
Police officers who meet with migrants on a daily basis have the most problems.
“Last month, one person was infected with malaria,” Nermina Cemalovic, health minister of the Una-Sana Canton, told Avaz news portal.
She points out that the Ministry receives weekly a report on the health status from all centers in the area of this canton – Miral, Bira, Student House in Borici, Sedra and Vucjak.
This means that two patients have so far been infected with malaria, and when doctors find that one of the migrants is infected, placing them in the infectious ward did not end the problem.
“As soon as they recover, the migrants escape from the hospital. We do not then have controls on where they are moving, mostly going in private accommodations. This worries us because we have no control. There is a great danger for the citizens, which is why we are constantly appealing,” Minister Cemalovic explained.
The unofficial Vučjak migrant camp, which lies on Bosnia’s north-west border with Croatia, is currently bearing the brunt of the country’s migrant crisis. And it is being stretched to breaking point.
As well as being surrounded by minefields from the Yugoslav wars, the camp has no toilets, no running water, no electricity, and is eight kilometres from the nearest town.
The migrants living here call it a jungle and it is. Even bears and wolves are starting to make their way into the camp as the surrounding mountains get colder.
About 600 migrants are currently living in Vucjak, although there were only about two thousand here a few days ago. No one knows for sure where they went. The City of Bihac has so far allocated more than 100,000 BAM for the temporary migrant center Vucjak. There are currently more than six thousand migrants in Bihac, with an additional 150 people arriving in the area every day.
A humanitarian activist Dirk Planert, who knows the area well and had been trying to provide aid in the camps, told DW at the beginning of October that following a ban on volunteers working in Vucjak, inhabitants had been left with “no medical aid.”
In October a team from DW’s Bosnian department reported that the camp in Vucjak contained between 800-1000 residents. They also wrote the EU states had already donated 10 million euros to provide better facilities but that “all of those upgrade projects have stalled due to bureaucratic squabbles and opposition from local municipalities.” The mayor of Bihac said around 6,000 migrants were in the area presently, according to the Italian news agency ANSA.
