Health experts:
Diseases at border becoming 'crisis'
Outbreaks
include TB, measles, scabies, lice, dengue fever, leprosy
Scabies mites irritate the skin and can be passed on through
clothing, bedding and towels
Health professionals are warning of a
“humanitarian crisis” festering in Texas and Arizona as a result of unchecked
border crossings of illegal-immigrant children into border communities.
Cramped conditions and the spread of
difficult-to-treat diseases has doctors worried in the wake of a massive influx
of children coming across the Mexican-U.S. border, many of them from Central
and South America. Outbreaks of scabies, lice, dengue fever, tuberculosis and
other diseases – many of them contagious – are already being documented among
the children and in some border agents who work among them.
“President Obama’s non-enforcement immigration
doctrine seemingly invites illegal border crossings, which brings with it a
wave of illnesses and diseases that have long been stamped-out in America,”
Rep. Phil Gingrey, R-Ga., told WND.
Gingrey, a 30-year practicing physician, said
the threat posed to American families is very real.
“There is a logistical nightmare these scarce
diseases impose on the medical community,” he said. “The White House must stop
neglecting the consequences of its reckless, open-border policies and protect
the health and safety of our citizens – not to mention the security of our nation.”
As many as 80,000 children, many smuggled in
by human traffickers without their parents, are expected to cross the southern
U.S. border illegally in 2014, according to U.S. Border Patrol, and that could
cost U.S. taxpayers up to $900 million. But if the flood of illegal border
crossings seen over the past few months continues, the government may need to
revise those estimates upward.
The Rio Grande Valley Sector of the Border
Patrol has detained nearly 150,000 illegal immigrants, which puts the area on
track to surpass last year’s total apprehensions of 154,453 just eight months
into the current fiscal year, according to a report by KGBT Action 4 News, a
CBS affiliate in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas.
Temporary holding centers have been set up by
the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in southwest Texas and in
Arizona to deal with the influx of illegals.
The situation has grown so dire that the
federal government has established temporary shelter for thousands of illegal
immigrants, most of them children, at Lackland Air Base in San Antonio, Texas.
In Nogales, Arizona, thousands more have been
packed into a makeshift holding center, a former warehouse, and were reportedly
sickened by the food.
CBS
News reports that the government is contracting with vendors to provide the
children with nutritional meals, while the Federal Emergency Management Agency
will offer counseling and recreational activities.
But whenever this many people are living in
such close quarters, the probability of outbreaks of disease is dramatically
increased, Gingrey told WND.
Of particular concern are tuberculosis,
measles, dengue fever and chickenpox. But some rare cases of leprosy have even
been reported in immigrants coming across the approximately 2,000-mile border
with Mexico.
The Department of Homeland Security could not
provide details on how many nurses or doctors are on site at the overcrowded
detention centers.
“We are starting to
see chicken pox, MRSA staph infections; we are starting to see different
viruses,” Rio Grande Valley Border Patrol agent Chris Cabrera told ABC
15.
A spokesman at the Rio Grande facility said
agents do not check children for sicknesses and are only responsible for
processing them.
“We don’t screen for
diseases,” RGV Border Patrol spokesman Omar Zamora told
Breitbart Texas. “All we are is a processing center, so we don’t do that.”
Spokespersons for the Centers for Disease
Control and the Texas Department of State Health Services did not respond to
WND’s request for comment Thursday.
The ABC 15 report from McAllen, Texas, said a
scabies outbreak began more than a month ago, and now reports of various
viruses are beginning to surface. Scabies is a contagious skin disease marked
by a severe, painful rash.
Tuberculosis is an airborne communicable
disease caused by bacteria that is spread from person to person. Symptoms
include fever, night sweats, coughing, chest pains and weight loss.
The Department of Homeland Security has not
allowed media access to the holding centers in Texas and has denied requests
for interviews with doctors and nurses who are working in the centers.
The agency would only release the following
statement:
“DHS has public health controls in place to
minimize any possible health risks. Throughout the RGV Sector we are conducting
public health screens on all incoming detainees to screen for any symptoms of
contagious diseases of possible public health concern. U.S. Border Patrol has
established Medical Units at its busiest border stations (McAllen, Weslaco and
Ft. Brown) handling UAC. U.S. Coast Guard medical teams are assisting with the
screening process, and providing healthcare evaluations for the sick and
injured.
“Occupational health and safety guidance has
been provided to for CBP personnel in the handling of subjects with signs of
health-related symptoms. Our workforce has been provided and encouraged to use
personal protective gear including latex or non-latex gloves, long-sleeve
shirts, and to take precaution including frequent hand washing.”
Diseases can easily pass from one country to
the next, according to Hidalgo County Health Department Director Eddie Olivarez
in the southwest tip of Texas.
“Believe it or not, we also have illnesses
that go from the U.S. south, so it’s very fluid both ways,” he told
ValleyCentral.com.
A skin disease coming into the Rio Grande
Valley concerns Chris Cabrera, a spokesman for the National Border Patrol
Council.
He told Action 4 News that 10-25 percent of
illegal immigrants have scabies, and now border agents are concerned for their
own health.
“A lot of people (are) coming in with the
disease, and it seems to be spreading, not just within the McAllen station, but
throughout the Valley and to some of our agents,” he said.
Rep. Ruben Hinojosa, D-Texas, confirmed to a
local TV station that he’s received complaints and has launched an
investigation.
In a statement, he said, “I have made a formal
request to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to investigate the reports
of overcrowding and disease among the detainees at the McAllen Border Patrol
facility.”
Right now Border Patrol is not confirming the
percentage of detainees with scabies or whether any agents have contracted the
disease.
Last week, photos leaked from a temporary
detention facility in Texas showed hundreds of children crammed into holding
rooms, without their parents, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents
processed them.
After they’re fingerprinted and given case
numbers, most are turned over to other government agencies or released outright
to parents who have no legal documentation for being in the U.S.
“A public health crisis, the likes of which I
have not seen in my lifetime, is looming,” she reported. “Hardest hit by
exposures to these difficult-to-treat diseases will be elderly, children,
immunosuppressed cancer-patients, patients with chronic lung disease or
congestive heart failure. Drug-resistant tuberculosis is the most serious risk,
but even diseases like measles can cause severe complications and death in
older or immunocompromised patients.
“TB is highly contagious – you catch it
anywhere around infected people: schools, malls, buses, etc. The drug-resistant
TB now coming across our borders requires a complex, extremely expensive
treatment regimen that has serious side effects and a low cure rate.”
Chagas, or “kissing bug” disease, caused by
the parasite Trypanosoma cruzi, is carried by the triatomine bug that transmits
disease to humans, Vliet reported. Although “kissing bugs” are already here,
they are not as widespread as in Latin America. Right now, Chagas disease is
uncommon in the U.S., so many doctors do not think to check for it.
Late last week, Texas public health officials
confirmed a new wave of dengue fever has cropped up in the southernmost tip of
Texas, marking the first outbreak the state has seen since 2005, according to
reports in the Scientific American. Texas public health officials announced
that the same area that saw an outbreak almost a decade ago now has 18
confirmed cases of the disease. Seven are believed to have been locally
acquired (rather than contracted when traveling to a dengue-endemic region),
according to the Texas Department of State Health Services. The dengue outbreak
in southern Texas’s Cameron County and neighboring Hidalgo County comes after
there had been an uptick in cases directly across the Texas-Mexico border in
Tamaulipas over the last couple of months.
The border area of Texas has also seen an
uptick in the number of dengue fever cases since late last year. In the last
decade, Cameron County, Texas, has seen 27 cases, so the 14 occurrences in that
county over the past few weeks is significantly higher than normal, according
to reports from Texas public health officials.
South Texas has a greater incidence of
infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, listeriosis and dengue fever than
other parts of the state. The border area, with large population centers and
multiple border crossings, make the prevalence of TB higher than in other
regions of the state or the country, according to the CDC.
South Texas had a higher rate of active TB
disease during 2001-05, with 8.6 persons per 100,000 population, than the rest
of the state, according to CDC statistics. Of the 13 Texas counties with the
highest incidence of TB, seven are located in South Texas. These counties have
more than twice the state average rate of TB. Webb County alone had a TB rate
of 19 persons per 100,000 population in 2001-2005.
In an effort to address the high incidence of
TB along the Texas-Mexico border, the Grupo Sin Fronteras TB Binational Project
was established in 1995 by the commissioners of health for Texas and the
Mexican state of Tamaulipas. The program provides medical consultations and
education on the transmission, prevention and treatment of TB. Successes of the
program include the identification of high rates of drug-resistant TB in
Mexico.
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2014/06/health-experts-diseases-at-border-becoming-crisis/#I4sY9Jrcof7Otv7h.99
Leo Hohmann is a freelance journalist and photographer working out
of the Atlanta area. He has been a reporter and editor at several suburban
newspapers in the Atlanta and Charlotte, North Carolina, areas and also served
a stint as managing editor of Triangle Business Journal in Raleigh, North
Carolina.
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