It’s getting worse. First we were told only refugees with latent TB are permitted entry into the US, then Michael Patrick Leahy writing at Breitbart reported that, no, active TB is coming in as well. Now, we learn that even a more serious problem could be developing in your towns with multi-drug resistant TB in a few refugees and other immigrants.
We checked our archives and sure enough we reported on several cases of TB in a frightened Sheyboygen, Wisconsin in 2013, here.
Pay attention to the fact that you (local and state taxpayers) are footing the bill for all of the meds! Isn’t diversity worth it though!
Hot off the presses at Breitbart:
Two refugees and a foreign student on a visa brought multi-drug resistant (MDR) tuberculosis (TB) to Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 2009 and 2011, according to a 2014 article in an epidemiology publication written with the cooperation of the doctors who treated them.
The introduction of MDR TB to the United States represents a serious public health threat, since its successful treatment is uncertain and very expensive. Active TB can usually be treated successfully in six to nine months at a cost of $17,000 per patient, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), but MDR TB treatment costs more than $150,000 per patient and can take between 20 and 26 months.
[….]
Twenty cases of MDR TB, all foreign-born, were diagnosed in Wisconsin over the eight year period between 2005 and 2012, according to the Wisconsin Department of Health Services.
Twelve of these cases were from the Hmong people in Laos (though Case 2 in the 2014 article was categorized as “drug resistant,” not formally MDR-TB, it was probably included among these 12, as well as Case 2’s “close household contact”), four were from India (including Case 3 from the 2014 article), one was from Burma (including Case 1 from the 2014 article), and one each were from China, Ethiopia, and Nepal.
State and local taxpayers in Wisconsin paid for the treatment of these twenty foreign-born cases of MDR TB. At a cost of $150,000 per patient, the total cost was an estimated $3 million.
Leahy has much more, I’ve only snipped a bit of the detailed report.
Let me ask all of you who plan to volunteer to help the new refugees as they arrive in Asheville, NC, Rutland, VT, Reno, NV, Charleston, WV, Ithaca, NY, Fayetteville, AR, Missoula, Montana and Radford, Virginia, do you know how to protect yourselves? And, how good is your local health department? Is it ready for this?
See our health issues category with 306 previous posts cataloged there.