Tashkent - The COVID pandemic has shown the need to safeguard the health of travellers and border staff as global mobility rebounds.

More than 22 million people crossed Uzbekistan’s borders the last year, and to mitigate disease transmission at airports and border crossings, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) has handed over equipment critical to public health. This included personal protective equipment, containers for medical waste disposal, first aid kits, and office space, in a donation worth USD80,000.

The equipment - funded by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention - was donated to the Sanitary-epidemiological Welfare and Public Health Service of Uzbekistan (SWPHS) and will be further distributed to eight road and air checkpoints across the Central Asia’s most populous nation.

Bakhodir Yusupaliyev, the Head of SWPHS, Shakhina Karamotova, the Country Representative of the US CDC in Uzbekistan and Zeynal Hajiyev, the Chief of Mission for Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Sub-Regional Coordinator for Central Asia attended the handover ceremony.

“The rapid growth of cross-border mobility of the population is becoming a global challenge for health-care systems around the world”, noted IOM’s Hajiyev. “The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the importance of the immediate strengthening capacity at points of entry and thus enhancing border health management.”

For more information please contact Shahzod Nazarov in Tashkent, at snazarov@iom.int