Category: health issues

Saudis crack down on foreign laborers; bring out security forces; camels next?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Why the crackdown?  They don’t want the cheap foreign laborers competing with Saudi citizens for jobs, and they are concerned about the amount of remittances ($$$) being sent out of S.A. (take note Gang of Eight!).

So when does the camel crackdown begin?

Longtime readers know that we have often mentioned the fact that Saudi Arabia takes no refugees and immediately deports any who sneak into the country.

In this case, the foreign workers may, at one time, have had visas to work in S.A., but now they are given the boot.

From Reuters via Yahoo.news (emphasis mine):

RIYADH (Reuters) – Saudi Arabian police clashed with foreign workers in a poor district of Riyadh on Saturday, nearly a week into a visa crackdown in which thousands have been detained and one man killed by police.

Security forces in riot gear fired into the air and used truncheons to disperse large crowds as scores of men ran through the streets, some throwing stones and other objects at cars and police, according to Reuters witnesses.

Two people were killed of which one was a Saudi while the other one was unidentified, the Saudi police said in a statement late on Saturday after it detained 561 people involved in the disturbances in the Manfuhah neighbourhood of southern Riyadh.

The police added that 68 people were injured.

Most of the foreign workers involved in the clashes appeared to be Africans.

In a previous statement, the police did not refer directly to Saturday’s clashes, or say how many had been injured or detained, but said that in light of “what has happened”, the authorities had designated a location for people to surrender voluntarily.

Authorities this year said they would no longer turn a blind eye to foreign workers breaking visa rules by working for companies that had not sponsored their entry into the world’s top oil exporter.

The intention is to end a black market for cheap imported workers, cut the foreign labour force, reduce the flow of remittances to other countries and make more private sector jobs available for Saudi citizens.

And, I bet there is some ethnic nationalism going on here too!

There is more, read it all.

Will the camel crackdown be next?

Meanwhile a Saudi camel has been found to carry the deadly MERS virus.  Imagine the problems ahead if the virus can move back and forth between the camel population and the human one.

From Breitbart:

The Saudi government said Monday that a camel has tested positive for MERS, in the first case of an animal infected with the coronavirus that has killed 64 people worldwide.

A camel owned by a person diagnosed with the disease had “tested positive in preliminary laboratory checks,” the health ministry said in a statement carried by SPA state news agency.

The ministry said it was working with the ministry of agriculture and laboratories to “isolate the virus and compare its genetic structure with that of the patient’s”.

Yikes! There might be as many as a million camels in S.A. says this wildlife website.

We have written about the MERS virus here and how it might threaten the annual pilgrimage to Mecca.

Another warning on polio outbreaks among refugees

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This time from The Lancet medical journal.  Story from Bloomberg News via Canada’s National Post:

Polio, the crippling virus driven to the brink of extinction, may return to Europe as regional conflicts undermine a US$10-billion eradication campaign.

Health worker vaccinating child in Afghanistan. AFP

Polio’s re-appearance in Syria last month after a 14 year absence raises the risk that the virus will hitch a ride on unsuspecting refugees fleeing the country and return to areas, including Europe, that have been polio-free for decades, according to a letter published in the The Lancet medical journal Friday.

“Polio is making a comeback,” Martin Eichner, a professor at the University of Tuebingen who co-authored the letter to The Lancet, said Friday. Eichner and a German colleague warned that the vaccine used in the U.S. and Europe offers only partial protection against infection and called for heightened screening of sewage systems near refugee settlements in Turkey and Jordan. Syrian war refugees, moreover, have begun arriving in Western Europe, including Sweden and Germany.

Syria isn’t the only area where poliomyelitis, as the disease is formally known, is rearing its head. It has resurfaced in the Horn of Africa as well as in sewage samples in Israel and Egypt.

Muslim extremists killing vaccinators in Pakistan!

Genetic analysis suggests the virus responsible for the cases in Syria is the same as the one found in Israel and Egypt, and came from Pakistan.

[….]

Twenty-two vaccinators have been murdered in Pakistan since December, and militants in North Waziristan have banned vaccination in the area, he said.

The photo is from this story about Pakistan health workers murdered by Muslim fanatics.

RenewAmerica notes latest cool trend in refugee resettlement: bringing in minors and gays

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Well, gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, transgender and the questioners!

RenewAmerica says about itself:

RenewAmerica is a grassroots organization that supports the self-evident truths found in the Declaration of Independence, and their faithful application through upholding the U.S. Constitution, as written. Its purpose is to thoughtfully and courageously advance the cause of our nation’s Founders.

The organization is for ALL people who consider themselves loyal Americans. It has no philosophy, image, or agenda beyond this one unifying premise: America must return to its founding principles if it is to survive.

RenewAmerica is thus nonpartisan and nondenominational.

Readers should know that there is a huge push worldwide to place under government supervision tens of thousands of so-called “unaccompanied minors.”  Just this summer we learned that the US alone is expected to ‘take-in,’ under the care of the federal resettlement contractors (which includes the US Conference of Catholic Bishops) 20,000 of the youths without parents (I’m not saying all 20,000 have sexual orientation problems!).   When those “youths” turn 18 they are free to leave the care of the contractors.

Here is the post that caught my attention this Sunday morning, entitled:  A gay subculture in the USCCB? Say it ain’t so!

Blogger Matt Abbott begins by citing Catholic World News:

Bridging Refugee Youth and Children’s Services (BRYCS), a project of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Migration and Refugee Services, has updated and expanded its training to workers in federally-funded refugee resettlement programs, in part to ‘address the needs of particularly vulnerable groups of children, including youth who may be gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered’….

Abbott goes on to comment:

The revised Tier One Training Manual – copyrighted by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, and published with the assistance of a Department of Health and Human Services grant – notes that ‘it is important to be alert for homophobic remarks among the staff. If any are made, discuss in a non-judgmental way how these kinds of remarks may make a young gay resident feel.’

‘Exploring Complexities’ – the new Tier Two Training Manual, also copyrighted by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, and published with the assistance of a Department of Health and Human Services grant – presents a scenario in which two male minors are ‘rubbing each other with their feet on the other’s genital areas.’

The training advises:

After allowing the staff to discuss this, you can suggest that the young men should learn not to engage in sexual contact in the residence, and they should develop a stronger sense of sexual boundaries – to keep sexual activities private, even after leaving the residence…

The BRYCS manual makes no reference to moral law or the practice of virtue.

Abbott reports that he reached out to Father Perozich, a priest of the Diocese of San Diego, who demonstrates the growing schism within the American Catholic Church between conservatives and the Catholic Left which dominates the USCCB.  Remember readers, the USCCB is funded primarily by you.

Father Richard Perozich (emphasis mine):

It appears that a practicing or promoting homosexual subculture may be active in the bureaucracy of this USCCB committee. It needs to be weeded out before a Catholic agency can help in a resettlement process. Youth with [same-sex attraction] need to be guided to the truth of sexuality as man or woman and not be harassed with labeling as LGBTQ.

If an agency cannot promote the Catholic truth, then the Catholic agency is not ready to assist in resettlement work. No one should ever abuse any human being by calling them gay, lesbian, transgendered, or bisexual, whether in false affirmation or in derision. Perhaps the committee will be faithful to Jesus and work with these people even if it is at odds with the perverse government standards.

You pay for almost every dollar of the USCCB’s annual income!

Go to page 11 of the USCCB’s 2012 annual report and note that they spent $70.3 million that year and $69.6 million is from the government (those ‘refugee travel loans’ are your money too!)—from you, the taxpayer!

The USCCB should decide if Catholic teaching trumps Caesar’s money.    It’s no contest and they have obviously already chosen!

We have dozens of posts on the USCCB, click here for more.

Detroit: Taxpayer funding for Iraqi mental illness in short supply

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

But surely the money will flow when Obamacare is in full swing—-right?

Therapist, Husam Abdulkhaleq, a Palestinian, says the Israelis imprisoned him for 6 months and tortured him in the early 1980’s, so he fled to America. hmmmm…

From The Huffington Post (emphasis mine):

Muntaha Flufel says on most days she sits alone at home watching TV, unable to interact with the community she lives in. She keeps her windows and doors locked, in fear that someone might break in and attack her like they did in Baghdad in 2004. Her scars are constant reminders — marks where the perpetrators dropped acid on her skin.

Although troops left Iraq nearly two years ago, hundreds of civilians are still being killed each month, leading many Iraqis to flee the continuing violence, which is contributing to an already dire refugee situation. According to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, since April of this year, 84, 902 Iraqis have been settled in the U.S., and new arrivals like Muntaha are reporting symptoms associated with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

We need to give some credit to this Huffington Post article by Erin Banco for even mentioning that these Chaldeans were tormented by Islamists!

According to health officials at ACCESS, a community organization dedicated to empowering and enabling individuals and families in the Detroit area, many of the new Iraqi Chaldean arrivals experienced primary and secondary trauma, having witnessed family members being killed, oftentimes persecuted at the hands of Islamist militias.

The trauma has caused what Husam Abdulkhaleq, the program manager of the psychosocial rehabilitation center, says includes nightmares, poor concentration, and extreme anger. The grueling process of integrating and assimilating in a new country only exacerbates the symptoms.   [Reporter Banco even dares to use the word “assimilating” a term usually verboten by the professional resettlers!—-ed]

It will be “disastrous” when the Syrians come!

The ACCESS psychosocial rehabilitation program receives the majority of its funding from the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), an organization that provides refugees with the services needed to integrate into their new communities. ACCESS just recently received another three years of funding from the group, but Abdulkhaleq says the money is significantly less than what it received in previous years.

ACCESS is barely able to provide services for the most recent arrivals from Iraq with the money it has. The next area of concern is the possible wave of Syrian refugees it could see over the next five years. If the UN begins to resettle even a portion of the hundreds of thousands who have been displaced by the violence in the US, officials at ACCESS say the consequences could be “disastrous.”

ACCESS’s potential client load should be increasing even without the Syrians as we resettled 19,491 potentially traumatized Iraqis in FY2013 alone!

The photo is from this 2001 story about ACCESS in the wake of 9/11 (his clients were really stressed!), but I found another article from 2004 only as a ‘document’ in which he describes his “torture” for no reason at all at the hands of the wicked Israelis.

Syrian refugees could be bringing Polio to EU

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment
British Health System: It’s a good thing we have socialized medicine for the refugees!

From Vaccine News:

An outbreak of acute flaccid paralysis from wild poliovirus in Syria could put European Union Member States at risk for contamination as refugees seek asylum, health officials warned on Thursday.

The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control urged EU countries to question Syrian refugees about their polio vaccination history and to administer vaccinations to anyone who isn’t inoculated.  [Will fundamentalist Muslims even tell the truth?—ed]

The WHO launched an investigation into an outbreak of AFP cases caused by wild poliovirus in Syria on Oct. 19. Since then, the national reference laboratory in Damascus, Syria, has concluded that the AFP cases were “likely caused by wild poliovirus.”

So far, 22 children have been diagnosed. Five victims are younger than 1-year-old, 13 victims are 1 to 2 years old and 4 victims are older than 2 years old.

Meanwhile, many Syrians have fled the country due to the ongoing conflict, and more had already applied for asylum in the EU before the outbreak. Regional and international public health officials are working to provide vaccinations to Syrians and displaced refugees.

The number of children who received polio vaccinations in Syria dropped from 95 percent in 2002 to 52 percent in 2012.

Photo is from the UK Mirror—-remember the dancing doctors and nurses from the London Olympic games.