Colorado Daily
March 5, 2003
Last fall in Commerce City, Colorado, a food service worker exposed over 1000 people to Hepatitis A before he was discovered. His disease isn't the only one Coloradoans are being exposed to this year.
In the past 40 years, a total of 900 cases of leprosy were recorded in the United States. Today more than 7,000 new cases arrived in this country from 'leprosy hotspots' in Mexico, Brazil, India and the Caribbean.
"And those are the ones we know about," said. Dr. William Levis, physician at Belevue Hospital's Hansen's Disease Clinic. "It's spreading, too," he said. "Many of our patients have never left the country, but came down with the disease through exposure."
As a result, leprosy is now officially endemic to the Northeastern United states for the first time ever.
Illegal aliens who work in food service will bring the most exposure to Americans. Leprosy's symptoms - bumpy rashes, skin indentations and loss of feeling in hands and feet - are often misdiagnosed for a variety of disorders including bug bites.
Another 'bug' riding in the bodies of newcomers to America is tuberculosis.
Sixteen thousand new cases of TB were detected in the U.S. of a disease that was once deemed 'extinct'. In a recent article, 'THE PATIENT PREDATOR', in "Mother Jones" magazine, Dr. Kevin Patterson said, "In the 1990's, cases of foreign born Americans rose from 29 percent to 41.6 percent. Strains of TB once found only in Mexico have migrated to borders states like Texas, Arizona and California. We have no cure for these strains."
Dr. Lee Reichmann of New York said in that same article that "At least half of all diagnosed TB cases are found among foreign-born people have moved to the USA. We sit on the edge of a potential catastrophe."
Most Americans sit, wait, watch and listen, but don't do anything until personally affected.
In Colorado, an illegal alien working at a Commerce City Taco Bell last fall exposed 1000 patrons to Hepatitis A. With more than 2 million immigrants arriving each year, both legal and illegal, you and your childen are at increased risk.
If you would like to do something, please act locally at www.cairco.org or nationally at www.numbersusa.com or write me at
frostyw@juno.com. I will help you take action.
Frosty Wooldridge
Here is part of another article:
Border River Is Also Sewage Drain: Officials fear diseases as immigrants use route to get to U.S.
CALEXICO, Calif. June 21 – As it flows north from Mexico into California's Imperial Valley, the New River not only brings with it more than 20 million gallons of raw sewage daily, but also a human cargo of illegal immigrants that may be drenched in bacteria and pollutants that cause communicable diseases.
Public health officials along the border worry about this toxic, infested river and the people who use it as a route into the United States.
A recent report by the federal Centers for Disease Control noted that California had double the rate of infections of two food-borne pathogens associated with human sewage, campylobacter and shigella, than any other state.
Along the Texas-Mexico border, health officials are battling tuberculosis brought in by undocumented workers from Mexico and Central America. Of the 16,500 people apprehended last year in the Port Isabel, Texas, region, 89 percent tested positive for TB bacteria.
The rate of full-blown tuberculosis in the lower Rio Grande Valley, a fertile agricultural area that borders Mexico, is triple the national average, according to Dr. Abraham Miranda, deputy director of immigration health services for the U.S. Public Health Service in Port Isabel.