Better get prepared for another health crisis. The health commissioner of New York City warned last week that the arrival of migrants from the southern border – more than 50,000 have entered the city in the last year – is bringing infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and polio to America.
In a letter to doctors and health care managers across the city, Commissioner Ashwan Vasan said that “many people who recently came to NYC have lived in or traveled through countries with high rates of TB.”
(Note: Vasan failed to mention that the home of his forebears, India, happens to be the country in the world most heavily infected with TB, with an estimated 2,740,000 active cases in 2017. Indian immigrants account for about 6 percent of the U.S. foreign-born population, making them the second-largest foreign-born group in the country, after only Mexicans.)
TB, or tuberculosis, is a bacterial infection that can be cured with antibiotics, but it usually takes six to nine months of treatment to recover. It is not easy.
TB is spread through the air, like the flu or a cold. If you stand next to someone with TB for a long subway ride or sit next to them every day at school, you can get infected.
New York City’s TB rate, at 6.1 cases per 100,000, is more than twice the national rate. Almost 9 out of 10 (88%) of these TB cases are people born outside the United States. Every neighborhood in the city has had at least one case.
Vasan’s letter urged New York to provide health care, food, and legal services to migrants. He did not say anything about protecting the people who already live here. Open borders import disease. Immigrants who legally apply for a visa have to undergo health screenings and show they are vaccinated, and refugees are screened for TB before entering the U.S. Not so for those who illegally cross the Rio Grande or come down from Canada in the Swanton Sector of New York.
Nationwide, 6,009 of the 8,300 people with TB in 2022 were foreign-born, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Florida has seen a 21% increase in TB since 2020. Texas border counties have a TB rate triple the national average.
At least TB can be treated. Polio, on the other hand, can paralyze you for life. We don’t know yet how big a threat the return of polio is. In the 1940s and early 1950s, thousands of Americans were permanently paralyzed by it, but vaccines ended that nightmare. New York’s last confirmed case was in 1990. Until last summer, when an unvaccinated Rockland County man became paralyzed by polio. His disease likely came from another country.
Vasan warned that only 50% of the migrants coming to the Big Apple are vaccinated. But an even bigger issue is the type of vaccine used in many poorer countries, which can actually spread polio. The U.S. uses only injectable polio vaccines made with dead virus that cannot spread the disease. But many other countries use a less safe oral vaccine that contains live virus and is sometimes shed in the vaccinated person’s feces. It can then spread in sewage or on unclean hands, causing vaccine-derived cases of polio.
New York City mayor Eric Adams complained this week that the influx of illegal migrants into the city has cost city government more than four billion dollars and is essentially “destroying” NYC. And he didn’t even cite Vasan’s health statistics. At the rate things are going, he may learn what true destruction really is.
For more, see the Boston Herald.