In April 2000, the UK National Asylum Support Service started a policy of dispersing asylum seekers from London and southeast England to alternative locations around the United Kingdom in an attempt to spread the cost of care. Although the number of people with HIV who are affected by this policy is unknown, more than 100 000 asylum seekers have so far been dispersed, many of whom are from regi...

BACKGROUND The aim of our article is to characterise and compare current standards of health care provision for asylum seekers in the 25 European Union (EU) countries in order to identify the needs and potential for improving access to health care for asylum seekers. METHODS The study is based on an e-mail survey performed between April and June 2004. The questionnaire was concerned with asyl...

Asylum seekers arriving in the United States are often imprisoned for months or years while their asylum claims are processed. Recently, Physicians for Human Rights and the Bellevue/New York University Program for Survivors of Torture released the findings of the first systematic study examining the health of detained asylum seekers. The study found that the mental health of asylum seekers inte...

As Fotaki (2019) argues, the current political climate in Europe is threatening principles of humanitarianism, particularly among refugees and asylum seekers. This commentary builds on that argument, with a spotlight on mental health and culturally relevant service design. By addressing some of the barriers faced by refugees and asylum seekers in accessing mental health...

BACKGROUND The length of stay in asylum centres is generally mentioned as a possible health risk to asylum seekers. Medical staff working with asylum seekers has claimed that long lengths of stay in asylum centres might cause or aggravate mental disorders. We used records from a large, multiethnic group of asylum seekers to study if the incidence of mental disorders increased with length of sta...

BACKGROUND National statistics have shown that only about 40% of asylum seekers actually attend the optional health assessment offered upon their arrival in Sweden, but the reasons for this have not been fully explored. Health assessments for newly arrived asylum seekers have become a regular practice in most EU countries, but what is performed, how it is organized and whether it is mandatory o...

What types of asylum seekers are Europeans willing to accept? We conducted a conjoint experiment asking 18,000 eligible voters in 15 European countries to evaluate 180,000 profiles of asylum seekers that randomly varied on nine attributes. Asylum seekers who have higher employability, have more consistent asylum testimonies and severe vulnerabilities, and are Christian rather than Muslim receiv...

Can different political ideologies explain policy preferences regarding asylum seekers? We focus on attitudes regarding governmental policy towards out-group members and suggest that perceptions of threat help to shape these policy attitudes. Study 1 compared public opinion regarding asylum policy in Israel (N = 137) and Australia (N = 138), two countries with restrictive asylum policies and wh...

BACKGROUND: Asylum seekers (AS) and refugees often suffer from severe psychopathology in the form of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). As PTSD impacts memory functions, and as asylum applications rely on personal accounts, AS with PTSD are at more risk of being rejected than refugees. METHODS: We studied the mental health of failed asylum seekers (FAS, N = 40) and a matched sample of AS (N...

Tuberculosis in asylum seekers in Belgium. P. Van den Brande, M. Uydebrouck, P. Vermeire, M. Demedts on behalf of the VRGT (Flemish Lung and Tuberculosis Association). ©ERS Journals Ltd 1997. ABSTRACT: Countries with a low incidence of tuberculosis have recently been faced with the problem of tuberculosis (TB) in asylum seekers from countries with a high TB prevalence. We report on the tubercul...