Cases of tuberulosis and measles, two diseases that had largely been eradicated in much of the US, are spiking in Chicago’s migrant shelters.
Officials with the Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH) have admitted that a “small” number of TB cases have been reported in various shelters, along with more than 55 cases of measles. The CDPH downplayed the significance of the report, stressing that TB is curable with antibiotics, is not particularly infectious, and is not exactly rare in the city, as something between 100 and 150 cases among Chicago residents are reported each year. “We do not consider this a matter presenting a substantial threat to the public,” the Department said in a statement.
Others are not quite so sanguine, however. Raymond Lopez, a Chicago alderman, told Fox and Friends on Thursday morning that the outbreak could have been prevented had the migrants been required to follow the same vaccination rules as US citizens. Lopez said:
This is a crisis we could have avoided, just like with the measles, if we had simply instituted the American standard of vaccines upon all those migrants being shipped to the city of Chicago. Many of these individuals come with children, they are in our schools and all of those vaccination requirements that our kids are responsible for are waived for the migrant asylum seeker children. And that is putting the people, families and communities at risk.
Unlike measles, tuberculosis has no effective vaccine. The vaccine that is available –Bacillus Calmette–Guérin (BCG) — is not widely used in the US for that reason, but it is routinely given to infants and small children in places where TB is common, which includes broad swaths of Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.
With in-migration from those areas a steadily growing problem, TB cases in the US are becoming more numerous. Last year, the number of US cases was the greatest in a decade. They increased by 1,295 from 8,320 in 2022 to 9,615 in 2023.
Migrants, particularly those from the third world, bring with them lots of infectious diseases. Admitting them en masse, as the Biden administration is doing, is a perfect way to re-establish old maladies once thought all but eliminated.
For more, see Fox News.