EL PASO, Texas (Border Report) – Juarez health officials are trying to contain a chickenpox outbreak at one of the largest migrant shelters in the city, a newspaper reported.
Up to 149 migrants have come down with the illness at the Leona Vicario federally-operated shelter; 12 cases remain active, Dr. Gumaro Barrios told El Diario.
Eighty percent of the infections involve children under 14 from Honduras, many of whom apparently never received a vaccine against the varicella-zoster virus that causes chickenpox, the health official told the newspaper. The shelter has special areas or pavilions where migrants with possible infectious diseases are quarantined.
This is the same migrant shelter where another 144 chickenpox cases were reported last year, also mostly involving minors.
Twenty-three government and church-run migrant shelters operate in Juarez and most of them are nearly full, the newspaper reported.
