Farmworker advocates and public health experts say President-elect Donald Trump’s threats of mass deportations are piling onto the existing fears agriculture workers have about participating in efforts to track the bird flu outbreak.
Infectious disease experts are calling for more testing and surveillance to monitor developments that could make the outbreak more dangerous. To accurately track it, they say they need more health data from farmworkers, who comprise nearly all of the people in the United States with confirmed bird flu infections. Undocumented immigrants make up much of the U.S.’s agricultural workforce and are a demographic Trump has said he would target.
The Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment, but public health experts and advocates worry that under his administration, farmworkers will be more apprehensive to report unsafe working conditions or to isolate and test when exposed to sick animals. They say that without more workplace protections and safe health care access for frontline workers, keeping track of the bird flu or other animal-to-human disease outbreaks will become even harder.