Public Health Costs

Mass immigration to this country has a deleterious impact on our nation’s medical system and the well being of our citizens. This is reflected in a report entitled Illegal Aliens Threaten U.S. Medical System by Madeleine Pelner Cosman, MD, published in the spring, 2005 edition of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.

“The influx of illegal aliens has serious hidden medical consequences,” writes Madeleine Pelner Cosman, “We judge reality primarily by what we see. But what we do not see can be more dangerous, more expensive, and more deadly than what is seen.”  Her report further states, “many illegal aliens harbor fatal diseases that American medicine fought and vanquished long ago, such as drug-resistant tuberculosis, malaria, leprosy, plague, polio, dengue, and Chagas disease.”

 Many illegals entering this country have tuberculosis, according to the report. “That disease had largely disappeared from America, thanks to excellent hygiene and powerful modern drugs such as isoniazid and rifampin,” says the report. “TB’s swift, deadly return now is lethal for about 60 percent of those infected because of new Multi-Drug Resistant Tuberculosis. Until recently MDR-TB was endemic to Mexico. This Mycobacterium tuberculosis is resistant to at least two major anti-tubercular drugs. Ordinary TB usually is cured in six months with four drugs that cost about $2,000. MIDR-TB takes 24 months with many expensive drugs that cost around $250,000 with toxic side effects.

 In 2001 the Indiana School of Medicine studied an outbreak of MDR­ TB, and traced it to Mexican illegal aliens. The Queens, New York, health department attributed 81 percent of new TB cases in 2001 to immigrants (and it must be presumed, illegal aliens, since legal immigrants undergo health screenings before being given an immigrant visa). The Center for Disease Control and Prevention ascribed 42 percent of all new TB cases to ‘foreign born’ people, who have up to eight times higher incidences. Approximately, 66 percent of all TB cases coming to America originate in Mexico, the Philippines and Vietnam.

According to the report, other health threats from illegals include:

·        Chagas disease, also called American trypanosomiasis or “kissing bug disease,” is transmitted by the reduviid bug, which prefers to bite the lips and face. The protozoan parasite that it carries, Trypanosoma cruzi, infects 18 million people annually in Latin America and causes 50,000 deaths. Chagas affects blood transfusions and transplanted organs. No cure exists. Hundreds of blood recipients may be silently infected.

·        Leprosy, also known as Hansen’s disease, was so rare in America that in 40 years only 900 people were afflicted. Suddenly, in the past three years America has more than 7,000 cases of leprosy. Leprosy now is endemic to northeastern states because illegal aliens and other immigrants brought leprosy from India, Brazil, the Caribbean and Mexico.

·        Dengue fever is exceptionally rare in America, though common in Ecuador, Peru, Vietnam, Thailand, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Mexico. Recently, according to the report, there was a virulent outbreak of dengue fever in Webb County, Texas, which borders Mexico. Though dengue is usually not a fatal disease, dengue hemorrhagic fever routinely kills.

·        Polio was eradicated from America, but now reappears in illegal immigrants, as do intestinal parasites, says the report.

·        Malaria was obliterated, but now is re-emerging in Texas.

Also, in an article entitled, “Parasitic Infection Plagues States along Mexico Border” by Joyce Howard Price, as carried by the Washington Times, February 8, 2007, federal researchers say neurocysticercosis, a brain infection caused by a pork tapeworm, is a “growing public health problem in the U.S.,” especially in states bordering Mexico, where the disease is endemic.

Neurocysticercosis is the most common parasitic disease of the central nervous system according to a study jointly conducted by the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and California public health officials, who reported that “international travel and immigration are bringing the disorder to areas where it is not endemic,” such as this country.

“Neurocysticercosis is the primary cause of epilepsy in endemic areas.  This brain worm is very serious,” Victor C. Tsang, chief of the immunochemistry laboratory in the Parasitic Disease Division of the CDC.  “Oral-fecal contamination is the standard route of transmission,” he said of the condition.

“Recent data indicate cysticercosis is an important cause of death in California,” Mr. Tsang and other authors wrote in a recent report on the disease published in the European medical journal Acta Neurologica Scandinavica.

A separate report in this months’s issue of the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases found that nearly 60 percent of the 221 U.S. deaths from cysticercosis between 1990 and 2002 involved California residents. “Most patients [187, or 85 percent] were foreign-born, and 137 [62 percent] had emigrated from Mexico.”  Carriers of this disease tend to be people from rural developing countries with poor hygiene, where pigs are allowed to roam freely and eat human feces.  Mr. Tsang said the condition is rife in Mexico and other parts of Latin America and Central America and “in a large part of China and Africa.”

Legal immigrants and visitors must demonstrate that they are free of communicable diseases and drug addiction to qualify for lawful permanent residence. 

Illegal aliens, however, cross our borders medically unexamined, carrying communicable diseases. This is not hypothetical. It is not just a possiblity. And it is not racist or jingoist or any other "ist" to bring it up: it is happening.  It matters, and it should be of concern to the American public. Illegal alien nannies who care for children in private homes, as well as restaurant and other service workers who have never had physical examinations serve millions every day.

That is not to condemn all illegal aliens as dirty or diseased; all are not. But hundreds of thousands of them come from places where hygiene is not yet a part of the daily routine, and where disease prevention, diagnosis, and treatment is not what we take for granted here.

Granting amnesty to millions of illegal aliens and their extended families (a predictable total population of some 70 million people over the next twenty years), who are predominately from Mexico, Central and South America, will undoubtedly have a grave impact on our public health scene for years to come.  The more contagious diseases that transit our borders, the more impact it has, both short and long-term.  Medical costs will escalate and the chances of infectious diseases becoming endemic to the U.S. increases proportionally.