2 weeks Ago By Betsy McCaughey
President Biden’s open-border policies allow deadly narcotics and criminal gangs to invade our country. But they’ve cleared the way for a silent killer to make its way across the border as well: tuberculosis. America’s woke public-health authorities are more concerned with equity — redistributing health resources among racial groups — than about keeping a disease the United States once nearly eradicated from becoming a threat again.
Reported cases of tuberculosis shot up 34% from 2020 to 2023, per the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and continue to rise. More than three-quarters of the cases are foreign-born people who picked up the disease in their home countries or while traveling through countries with high TB rates. The TB incidence rate is 60 times higher in Haiti than in the United States.
In New York City — the No. 1 destination for migrants — the incidence of TB is 21⁄2 times the national average, and rising. A staggering 89% of TB patients in the Big Apple are foreign born.
The Flushing/Clearview areas of Queens, Sunset Park, Brooklyn and the Lower East Side of Manhattan are the neighborhoods most affected. Chinese nationals make up the single largest group with reported TB cases, according to city’s most recent Annual Tuberculosis Summary. TB is no laughing matter: Globally, it has just overtaken COVID-19 as the biggest infectious-disease killer on Earth.
There is no effective vaccine for it, but most cases can be treated with antibiotics — if they’re taken daily, without interruption, for several months or longer. Not easy. Western Europe, Scandinavia and North America are all reporting rising TB rates as migrants from poorer countries — where tuberculosis is common — arrive.
British health authorities are alerting the public to the distinctive cough that comes with TB, and public-health authorities throughout Europe are engaged in a lively debate about how to affordably screen TB carriers and keep them from infecting the local population. Someone can carry latent TB for years, and then suddenly, after resettling in a new country, develop an active and highly contagious case, spreading it by coughing and sneezing. But in the United States, the mission-confused CDC is stressing health equity over prevention and public education and rushing resources to the “disproportionately affected” groups.
That’s fine, but how about shielding Americans from the re-emergence of a disease we had largely eliminated? In all the agency’s reports, not a word about what’s causing the surge in TB: an open border. Our immigration laws do provide a mechanism to halt this dangerous disease. Immigrants who enter the country legally and apply for green cards are screened for TB with the IGRA blood test.
Latent carriers aren’t barred from the United States; they’re allowed into the country and referred to a local health department for follow-up treatment. It’s voluntary and hit-or-miss, but better than nothing. Migrants flooding across the border illegally, or entering with Biden’s online parole app, get no screening.
Zip. The CDC is MIA, doing nothing to screen and isolate the infected before they bring tuberculosis to cities and towns across the country. The agency is forgetting its “Control and Prevention” mission.
Take the case of a Chinese migrant who crossed the border illegally in April with active, drug-resistant TB. When her symptoms worsened and she was diagnosed on July 23 as “highly positive,” nothing was done to isolate her. Instead, she was shuffled between immigration processing facilities in California and Louisiana, exposing hundreds.
Now Louisiana is suing federal authorities to keep the exposed migrants detained until they’re medically cleared; state Attorney General Liz Murrill warns about illegals who are “untested for diseases that threaten the lives of American citizens.” Thousands of unaccompanied minor children with latent TB are being released into the United States — rather than being kept in Health and Human Services shelters for the many months it would take to treat them with a course of antibiotics. CDC data show a whopping 42% increase in incidence of TB among children ages 5 to 14 in the last year alone.
On Nov. 1, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Alexandro Mayorkas demanding that he erect precautions against this disease invasion.
Tuberculosis “is rapidly spreading through the millions of unscreened illegal immigrants released into the interior of the United States,” Lee warned. The number of reported cases this year — just under 10,000 — is small, but the accelerating trend is worrisome. The United States waged a war against TB in the 20th century and won it.
Americans shouldn’t have to surrender to this disease now because of open borders. Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York and co-founder of the Committee to Save Our City ..
