Travellers’ ethnicity should be routinely recorded, says microbiology expert

Irish Travellers’ ethnicity should be “routinely recorded” when they present to health services with notifiable diseases, a leading authority on microbiology has said.

Dr Ronan O'Toole from the school of medicine at Trinity College Dublin, said this was necessary to help find out why Travellers were more susceptible to some communicable diseases.

His comments come on foot of findings that Travellers had three times the infection rate of tuberculosis as the settled, white population and also that they contracted TB at a much younger age.

The research, just published in the international journal, Epidemiology & Infection, was conducted between 2002 and 2013 by the school of medicine in Trinity College and the Health Protection Surveillance Centre (HPSC), in conjunction with Pavee Point.

Health outcomes

It found the number of new cases each year for TB among Irish Travellers was about three times higher than in among the white settled population.

"The research team also found that in Irish Travellers the average age of a TB patient was 26 years compared to 43 years in the general population in Ireland and 49 years in the white Irish-born population," it said.

Dr O’Toole, lead researcher, said the findings showed continuing disparities in health outcomes for Irish Travellers. “Further research into the specific risk factors that impact on the incidence of TB and other communicable illnesses in Irish Travellers is now needed.

He said routine recording of Irish Traveller ethnicity for notifiable illnesses would aid the identification of inequities in incidence rates as well as their respective determinants.