Brockton Health Department Airs First Haitian Creole TB Education Broadcast

BROCKTON -- March 28, 2025, Brockton's Board of Health broadcast its first Haitian Creole-language tuberculosis education program on March 28, targeting the city's Haitian community directly. Dr. Mont-Desir, director of the Brockton Health Department, and Dr. Marie-Jacques Toussaint, a physician trained in Haiti, co-presented the segment on Brockton's community access TV, covering TB biology, symptoms, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention. Mont-Desir warned viewers that TB case rates are rising in Massachusetts, attributing the trend in part to immune system compromise caused by the COVID-19 pandemic: "Perhaps this is one of the reasons the rate of people with tuberculosis is increasing in the state of Massachusetts, because we have just come out of a period of great pandemic." Toussaint stressed that the standard antibiotic regimen lasts six to nine months and that incomplete treatment risks producing drug-resistant TB strains, while noting that Massachusetts assigns public health workers to accompany TB-positive patients through the full treatment process. The doctors emphasized that tuberculosis "does not make any discrimination, it is not a disease of the poor."