The lethal violation of the nation's most basic public health protocols.
May 26, 2016
An outbreak of deadly infectious tuberculosis among refugees President Obama sent to Indiana is a frightening reminder that the administration's dangerous immigration policies are putting American lives at risk.
In a frenzied rush to bring as many non-English-speaking Third World aliens to the country as possible before his presidency ends in a few months, Obama is allowing Syrian war migrants and refugees to be brought into the country without first undergoing proper medical examinations, a violation of the nation's most basic public health protocols.
“Tuberculosis is one of the most lethal infectious diseases in history,” said Dr. Jane Orient, executive director of the Association of American Physicians and surgeons. “It is easily transmitted, say on a public bus [and] increasingly, it is becoming highly resistant to all our antibiotics,” she said.
It is clear that Obama doesn't care about the health and well-being of the American people. That was obvious when he began pushing to create the so-called death panels that Obamacare mandates. But now as a result of the president's recklessness, fatal diseases are surfacing or making a comeback in the U.S. Among those ailments are pneumonia, paralysis-causing acute flaccid myelitis, dengue fever, swine flu, and enterovirus D68.
Under Obama, immigration policy aims to import new Democratic voters -- the less skilled, less educated, less enamored with the norms and values of Western civilization, the better. Lackluster border security, risible efforts at immigration law enforcement, mass amnesties, promises of generous taxpayer-financed welfare benefits, and other goodies, are used by Obama to expand and remake the American electorate.
Prior to the Obama era, tuberculosis was a rare diagnosis and many thought the disease had more or less been eradicated in the United States. Multi-drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis have been reported in populous California, Florida, Texas, and New York, all of which have large concentrations of illegal aliens.
Breitbart News reports that the four individuals in the Hoosier State with active tuberculosis (TB) were sent there by the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement in 2015. The origin countries of the quartet were not publicly available at time of writing but they're not the only refugees in that state with tuberculosis. Just 77 percent of the 1,885 refugees the feds sent to Indiana last year completed the post-arrival medical screenings that identified the four persons with active TB. No medical data is available for the remaining 420 who were not screened. Of the 1,885 refugees, 80 percent came Myanmar.
Last year close to 400 migrants with latent TB arrived in Indiana, according to state health authorities. Indiana's TB rate had been falling in the five decades up to 2010, but it is now rising as more migrants move to the state.
While latent TB itself is not infectious, 10 percent of those with latent TB later develop active infectious TB, a particularly nasty ancient disease.
"Tuberculosis (TB) ... bacteria usually attack the lungs," according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS), "[b]ut TB bacteria can attack any part of the body, such as the kidney, spine, and brain."
The primer on the malady that used to be called the White Plague continues:
"If not treated properly, TB disease can be fatal. ... TB is spread through the air from one person to another. The bacteria are put into the air when a person with active TB disease of the lungs or throat coughs, sneezes, speaks, or sings. People nearby may breathe in these bacteria and become infected. ... In the early 1900s, TB disease killed one out of every seven people living in the United States and Europe. ...
"[R]acial and ethnic minority populations and foreign-born individuals continue to account for a large number of TB cases in the United States. This is why the initial screening for TB and the appropriate treatment of TB for individuals coming to the United States and living here permanently is an important tool to help eradicate the disease in the United States and worldwide."
The Obama administration doesn't even follow its own advice on screening because resettling refugees is more important to the Obama administration than protecting people who are already here in the country.
Dr. Orient blasted the Obama administration for letting refugees in without testing for latent TB.
“Admitting people who might cause an epidemic makes no sense whatsoever from a public health standpoint,” Orient said. “It suggests that those who favor it do not care about the cost in suffering, death, and expense to Americans.”
“If for humanitarian reasons we wish to help people fleeing persecution, there is still no need to release them into the general population of susceptible individuals," she explained. "Officials who place politics above the health of Americans need to be held accountable and removed from positions of authority."
And the Zika virus from Latin America, which causes microcephaly, i.e. severe fetal brain defects, has immigrated to the United States under President Obama's watch. Cases have been found in 11 states and in the District of Columbia.
"People from Central and South America, ground zero for Zika and other infectious diseases including tuberculosis, dengue, Chagas, Chikungunya and schistosomiasis, make up nearly 15 percent of the illegal-immigrant population in the U.S.," notes Michelle Malkin.
The ongoing invasion at the border with Mexico is exposing Americans to numerous health risks.
"What's coming over into the U.S. could harm everyone," said Southern Texas Border Patrol agent Chris Cabrera. "We are starting to see scabies, chicken pox, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus infections, and different viruses."
Syrian refugees have brought leishmaniasis, a terrifying parasitic flesh-eating disease prevalent in Syria, to Turkey and Lebanon. In the 18th century a British physician called the illness the "Aleppo boil and Aleppo evil." U.S. immigration screenings would likely miss the difficult-to-treat disease which spreads to humans through sandflies because its victims can be asymptomatic for a long time.
It is important to bear in mind that contrary to what left-wingers say, it is not nutty or racist to be concerned about foreigners importing diseases; population movement is how diseases spread.
Aliens and even some citizens may unwittingly bring in pathogens for which Americans have not developed immunity. Sometimes these maladies cause death on an epic scale. For example, centuries ago Europeans brought pathogens like the smallpox virus on their bodies to the new world. Indigenous Indian communities were wiped out because they had never encountered it before.
Fortunately, not everyone in Washington, D.C. has been asleep at the wheel on public health issues.
Two public health experts at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) sounded the alarm last year about the Obama administration's appalling disregard for the safety of Americans.
In an email exchange between Logistics Management Specialist George Roark and Public Health Advisor William Adams, Roark wrote that “no country in the world would allow” Obama's massive influx of unwanted foreigners.
Adams answers in the correspondence released under the Freedom of Information Act that “in ten years or less, they’ll all be voting ... Commander’s intent ... ” Roark characterizes Obama as “the worst pres[ident] we have ever had ... he truly is ‘the amateur’ but a Marxist too.”
The year before CDC Intelligence Analyst Daniel Bubacz mockingly referred to Obama's border policy as a “Leave No Child on the other Side of the Border Policy.”
So far no one in the Obama White House is listening.