Cal Thomas wrote: If anyone needs another reason to oppose illegal immigration, to which the Bush Administration continues to turn a blind eye, how about the spread of a deadly communicable disease?
According to an essay in the current issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, a form of tuberculosis that has shown itself resistant to several drugs has invaded California and is present primarily in the state's "foreign-born" population, a politically correct euphemism for illegal aliens....
Dr. Madeleine Cosman, Ph.D., ESQ: Illegal aliens cross America’s borders medically unexamined. We shrug. We do not know what Illegal Aliens carry in their backpacks. We do not know what they carry in their bodies.
Read the latest headlines about illegal immigration.
Long ago we knew what legal immigrants brought with them. When my grandpa came to America, he kissed the ground of New York’s Ellis Island, then he stripped naked and coughed hard. Every legal immigrant before 1924 was examined for infectious diseases upon arrival and tested for tuberculosis. Anyone infected was shipped back to the old country. That was powerful incentive for each newcomer to make heroic efforts to appear healthy....
Today, legal immigrants must demonstrate that they are free of communicable diseases and drug addiction to qualify for lawful permanent residency Green Cards.
But Illegal Aliens stop at no medical checkpoint. Whoever walks through our foolishly open Golden Door comes in healthy or sick. If a border patrol sentry catches a healthy Illegal Alien he might be sent back home immediately. However, if we catch and detain a sick Illegal Alien, who after examination by physicians in a detention center proves to have a serious disease, we keep him! Foolish compassion makes us fear that his home country has neither adequate medical resources nor modern wonder drugs. So we release sick Illegal Aliens to the American streets, to infect others if their diseases are contagious, or we place them in our Medicaid program where we pay for their expensive treatments....
Now this:
Arizona and the Valley are in the grip of a whooping cough outbreak, as the number of sick continue to rise and health officials warn the 500 reported cases are just a fraction of what’s out there.
A new booster vaccine for adolescents may keep the disease from spreading to infants in their own households, and an adult version due in August could prevent future outbreaks. But it’s too late for either to contain current cases, said state epidemiologist David Engelthaler.
“It’s not going to do a lot to stem the tide of the outbreak,” Engelthaler said, “because it’s much larger than that.”
Adolescents and adults are passing whooping cough on to babies and small children, who are most at risk of severe complications, and even death, from the highly contagious disease. Those immunized as children are still susceptible because the vaccine’s effectiveness eventually wears off.
The 244 cases of pertussis — also known as whooping cough — reported so far this year in Maricopa County are just shy of the 258 cases reported for all of 2004. About 80 percent of the cases are among older children and adults, with babies making up most of the rest. In a normal year, infants make up just 5 percent to 10 percent of the cases.
“If the percentage of cases is high in infants, that just means we’re missing a lot of adolescents and adults,” Engelthaler said. “We know we’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg, and it’s much larger than in past years.”
We haven't seen this in our country because we all took care to get immunized against these deadly diseases...
Cal Thomas asks the right questions:
If the threat of terrorism and a contagious disease like TB is not sufficient to get the government to stop harassing native-born Americans at airports and begin concentrating on shutting down the flow of illegal aliens across our borders, what is?
Do politicians so crave the votes of people who break our laws and the approval of Mexican President Vicente Fox that they are willing to jeopardize the health and welfare of the legally residing citizens of this country?
Just exactly WHAT IS IT GOING TO TAKE??
DR
