Diseases have become the latest "import" to America
From: Jonque Publick (nospam_at_nospam.com)
Date: 02/13/05
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Date: Sun, 13 Feb 2005 14:35:32 -0800
Just another reason to add to the long list of reasons to close the borders,
airlines from foreign countries, and boats. The Liberals want to ban
smoking, eating meat, and fast food all for *health reasons.* Well, let's
ban immigrants and tourists unless they have a health certificate....for
REAL health reasons! The Liberals would probably also say that this is our
payback for giving the native Americans smallpox, syphilis, and other
European diseases. What's worse, some are bringing drug-resistant strains of
disease here.
Example: Mexicans who can get TB drugs over the counter. They take an
incomplete course of the year-long treatment and develop drug-resistant TB.
If Saddam had injected political oppenents with this stuff and unleashed
them in our cities, everyone would have rightly screamed, *biowarfare,* but
since it's just millions of illegals displacing blue collar Americans, it's
*shut up and die,* right?
_____________________________________________________
Disease, unwanted import
By Joyce Howard Price
Contagious diseases are entering the United States because of
immigrants, illegal aliens, refugees and travelers, and World Health
Organization officials say the worst could be yet to come.
In addition to a list of imported diseases that includes tuberculosis,
sickle cell anemia, hepatitis B, measles and the potentially deadly
parasitic disease Chagas, officials fear what could happen if the avian flu,
which is flourishing among poultry in Southeast Asia, mutates so that it is
capable of human-to-human transmission through casual contact.
The bird flu has killed at least eight Asians since early January.
Several of those deaths - in Vietnam and Thailand - were believed to have
been caused when the virus passed between people who had sustained contact.
If the avian flu mutates so that it can be transmitted with only casual
contact, WHO authorities predict at least 7 million and as many as 100
million would die in a worldwide pandemic.
Another concern with Asian immigrants in this country is the link
between Asians and hepatitis B, said Jordan Su, program manager for the
Asian Liver Center at Stanford University. She said the link is alarming
enough to warrant action on its own.
Hepatitis B is a "very common epidemic in Asia" and more than half of
the 1.3 million cases in this country are among Asians, who make up only 4
percent of the U.S. population, she said.
"We hope the government will pass a bill that requires every immigrant
to be tested for hepatitis B," Ms. Su said.
"People, in general, bring in diseases from their home countries. But I
don't want to say all immigrants are carrying diseases," said Dr. Walter
Tsou, president of the American Public Health Association.
Dr. Kenneth Castro, director of the Division of TB Elimination at the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, said the job of
preventing these diseases must extend beyond the United States.
"Many diseases know no borders, but all policies to prevent the
importation of disease need to be reasonable and implementable, and our
efforts to improve disease control cannot be restricted to our borders," he
said.
Concerns about imported disease prompted the State Department on Jan. 21
to temporarily suspend travel to this country by Hmong refugees from the Wat
Tham Krabok camp in Thailand. The order came after federal health officials
learned of at least 25 confirmed cases of TB among refugees from that camp
who had resettled in California, Wisconsin and Minnesota.
Enhanced medical screening and treatment of the refugees are under way
both in Thailand and this country, and State Department officials say it
could be six months before the travel ban is lifted.
TB a growing threat
According to international health officials, about a third of the
world's population is infected with the bacteria that cause tuberculosis. TB
that is resistant to multiple drugs is rampant in many parts of the world,
including Peru, Russia, the Baltic nations, Hunan province in China, the
Dominican Republic and parts of South Africa, according to Dr. Castro. Some
of the cases of TB diagnosed among Hmong refugees resettled in this country
are drug-resistant, which makes them far more difficult and costly to treat.
Personnel with the CDC's Division of TB Elimination have said in various
reports that "immigration is a major force that sustains the incidence of
tuberculosis" in the United States and other developed countries.
"TB cases among foreign-born individuals remain disproportionately high,
at nearly nine times the rate of U.S.-born persons," researchers said in a
2004 report in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
The report found that people from outside the United States accounted
for 53.3 percent of all new tuberculosis cases in this country in 2003. That
was up from fewer than 30 percent in 1993. In 2003, nearly 26 percent of
foreign-born TB patients in the United States were from Mexico. Another
third of the foreign-born cases were among those from the Philippines,
Vietnam, India and China, the CDC report said.
But Dr. Tsou says TB data are "misleading." He points out that an
immigrant might be in this country for years with "inactive" tuberculosis.
"But now, after being here for a long time, that person's immunity wanes,"
and he or she develops active TB, which can become contagious, he said.
The fear of imported disease has led to a push by Rep. Tom Tancredo,
Colorado Republican, for a moratorium on immigration.
In a recent statement, Mr. Tancredo, chairman of the House Immigration
Reform Caucus, cited the "serious consequences" associated with the
"smuggling" of illegals into the United States without proper medical
screening.
"Among them are the possibilities of the spread of diseases for which we
have few, if any, antidotes," he said.
Mr. Tancredo's worries were prompted, in part, by the rising migration
of Hispanics to the United States and a potential increase in the number of
cases of Chagas disease, which is spread by insect bites in South America
and which can be spread through blood transfusions. It is curable in its
early stages, but kills about a third of the people infected if it is not
caught in time.
The American Red Cross estimates that nationally, the risk of a blood
donor having antibodies to Chagas or being infected with the disease is 1 in
25,000. The risk is 1 in 5,400 in Los Angeles and 1 in 9,000 in Miami. The
Red Cross says it will begin screening donors for Chagas, once a suitable
test is found.
Blood supply at risk
"An estimated 15 million South Americans [plus Mexicans and Central
Americans] are suffering from Chagas," said Dr. Arthur C. Aufderheide of the
University of Minnesota School of Medicine. "I'm amazed" that only five
cases have turned up in the U.S. blood supply since 1986.
Federal data suggest that as many as 10 percent of the approximately
1,000 Mexicans who emigrate to the United States daily probably are infected
with Chagas, said Dr. Louis V. Kirchhoff, a Chagas specialist and a
professor at the University of Iowa's medical school.
Other researchers say immigration is resulting in population shifts that
are contributing to a rise in sickle cell anemia.
While many incorrectly believe the disease is a condition that afflicts
only blacks or it has been eradicated, one in every 16 Hispanics - the
fastest-growing U.S. immigrant group - also carry the genetic trait that can
cause the painful and incurable blood disorder.
The number of Hispanic sickle cell cases in the United States has risen
rapidly, and one in every 900 Hispanic infants in this country is born with
the disease, said Gil Pena, outreach director for the American Sickle Cell
Anemia Association, based at the Cleveland Clinic.
Dr. Samuel L. Katz, one of the world's foremost authorities on measles
and a professor of pediatrics at Duke University, says the childhood illness
is another contagious disease linked to immigration. In the 1960s, he was
part of a team that developed an effective vaccine against the disease.
"Instead of having millions of measles cases, as we did in the old days,
in the last 10 years, there have been less than 100 cases of measles per
year in this country," Dr. Katz said. "We're able to study the genes of the
virus to learn where it came from, and almost all of the measles cases that
have been found in the United States [in recent years] were imported from a
variety of different countries," he said.
The pediatrician noted that many of the imported measles cases have come
from Japan, Germany and Italy. Those developed nations "have not been as
aggressive about measles immunization" as some other countries, he said.
While acknowledging that certain illnesses occur predominantly in
foreign-born people, Dr. Alfred DeMaria, director of the Bureau of
Communicable Disease Control of the Massachusetts Health Department, said
foreign travel, not immigration, is the real culprit.
Dr. DeMaria cited a case in his state last fall in which a Haitian-born
woman was diagnosed with diphtheria. The throat infection is common in
places such as Haiti and other countries in South and Central America, Asia,
Africa, the Middle East, Turkey and Albania, but it is extremely rare in
this country because of mass immunization.
Dr. DeMaria said it is believed the 60-year-old woman got diphtheria
from her husband, who recently had traveled to Haiti. Although he had no
symptoms, health officials found evidence of the infection in his throat.
"If I vacationed in Tanzania, I could bring any number" of tropical
diseases back home to this country, as could a globe-trotting businessman,
he said. But "there's very limited risk of transmission in this country,"
Dr. DeMaria said, concluding that "refugees and immigrants don't account for
major problems" in terms of public health.
Despite the risks, the CDC's Dr. Castro said the "facility of movement"
between countries must be preserved.
"If everyone is required to have a chest X-ray before getting on a
plane, it's not going to work," he said.
But immigration opponents contend immigrants are carrying Third World
diseases - some of which had been virtually eradicated here - to the United
States.
"Mass immigration is a threat to our nation's health. Diseases nearly
eradicated are breaking out again," the U.S. Immigration Reform Political
Action Committee says at its Web site.
The cost of care
Immigrants, particularly illegals, also impose "huge costs" on the U.S.
health care system, especially in states bordering Mexico, says Steven A.
Camarota, research director for the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS).
According to a survey by the American Hospital Association (AHA),
hospitals in 24 Southwest border counties in Arizona, California, Texas and
New Mexico reported uncompensated care totaling nearly $832 million in 2000.
A subsequent report prepared for the U.S.-Mexico Border Counties
Coalition determined that about 25 percent of those nonreimbursed costs
resulted from emergency medical treatment provided to undocumented
immigrants.
Ray Borane, mayor of Douglas, Ariz., says he knows about those financial
burdens firsthand.
"The city of Douglas is the major crossing point for illegals ... and
there have been some people who have come over here specifically to get
dialysis or complicated eye surgery. They've established illegal residency
in this country in order to thrive off the health care system," he said,
adding, "Illegals and undocumented immigrants don't have any health
insurance. We've never been reimbursed for their care, and the federal
government has looked the other way, so they are not held responsible."
However, Mr. Borane, a Democrat, said medical services available for
illegals have been "drastically" reduced since Arizona voters enacted
Proposition 200 last November, which requires proof of U.S. citizenship for
those seeking medical treatment or other public services in that state.
For the most part, however, "hospitals treat first and bill later, and
they aren't required to ask about a person's citizenship before providing
treatment," said Tiffany Himmelreich, spokeswoman for the Ohio Hospital
Association.
She said hospitals in that state treat their share of immigrants,
particularly Somalis in Columbus and "many Latin farm workers in the
Cleveland and Toledo areas." She was unable to say how many lack health
insurance.
Under new federal Medicare rules that took effect Oct. 1, medical
workers are required to "make a good-faith effort to obtain citizenship
information" from patients who receive emergency care in hospitals or
doctors' offices. The rules were issued in July after Congress established a
$1 billion immigrant health program under the 2003 Medicare law to assist
those who provide emergency care to undocumented aliens.
Advocates for illegals fear the new rules will drive those without
papers underground, and they will not get the health services they need.
They are seeking legislation that would prohibit health care providers from
informing immigration officials about people who are in this country
illegally.
A report by CIS, using 2004 data, "found that 35 percent of [all]
immigrants don't have health insurance, and an estimated 65 percent of
illegals don't have it," Mr. Camarota said. In contrast, fewer than 13
percent of U.S. natives and their children lack health insurance, the
analysis showed. In 2002, he said, the federal government spent $2.5 billion
to provide families of illegal immigrants with Medicaid and another $2.2
billion to provide medical treatment for uninsured illegals.
"State and local governments probably spent another $1.6 billion on top
of that providing health insurance for illegal aliens," said Mr. Camarota,
whose group analyzes Census Bureau data.
The health system of Los Angeles County, Calif., has been described as
the largest safety net for the uninsured in the nation.
"We have 2.5 million uninsured people in Los Angeles County out of a
population of 9.6 million," said Dr. Brian Johnston, a trustee of the Los
Angeles County Medical Association.
California state law requires that counties provide medical care for the
uninsured. "But we have the lowest rates of reimbursement for Medicaid of
any program in the United States," he said.
Dr. Johnston said the situation has been bleak for health providers and
patients alike.
"In 2002, [emergency rooms] and trauma centers in California provided
$520 million worth of medical care for which they received no reimbursement.
About $150 million was lost in Los Angeles County alone," he said. Those
losses were 18 percent higher than in 2001, and those in 2001 were 16
percent ahead of 2000. "So this puts the entire system at risk," Dr.
Johnston said.
He noted that Los Angeles County experienced the closings of seven
emergency rooms last year and 16 clinics the year before.
Although many of the uninsured people flooding emergency rooms and
clinics in Los Angeles are illegal immigrants, Dr. Johnston doesn't think
most are trying to rip off the system.
"Illegals come here to work, and they do work. But they can't get health
insurance," he said.
Screening at home
Some see stepped-up health screening in immigrants' home countries or
immigration bans as methods to attack imported health crises.
"I'm sympathetic to the plights of many states that are spending lots of
resources for services for immigrants. But to deny people health care is
counterproductive," Dr. Tsou said.
He says it's "necessary to detect these diseases early" in the
foreign-born. But this country's health care system makes that difficult,
"since Medicaid is denied to legal immigrants for five years."
"Pregnant immigrant women are examples of how this health care system is
dysfunctional, since they are denied prenatal care. But their babies do
receive Medicaid. We should give people medical care, regardless of their
citizenship status," Dr. Tsou said.
http://washingtontimes.com/specialreport/20050212-112200-6485r.htm
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