What Are We Importing Exactly?

Source: LAT

Among the myriad problems and dangers associated with illegal entry into this country the one that makes people the most squeamish is disease. As if by noting that illegal immigrants are placing Americans at risk of exotic or previously defeated diseases is somehow demeaning the poor delicious crispy illegal alien. Well, squeamishness be damned this is a serious problem and it needs to be addressed.

A little-known but potentially deadly parasite from Latin America has become one of the latest threats to the blood and organ supplies in the United States...

Last year, two heart transplant patients at different Los Angeles hospitals contracted the parasitic disease, called Chagas, causing health authorities to issue a national bulletin. Within months, both patients subsequently died, although not directly from Chagas...

The parasite, which is generally passed to humans from a blood-sucking insect that looks like a striped cockroach, can feed over years on tissues of the heart and gastrointestinal tract. After decades, tissues can be eroded so much that the organs fail.

“Curbing illegal entry will diminish the problem of exposure to such diseases because legal immigrants are medically screened to protect the U.S. public,” said Jack Martin, special projects director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, an immigration control group.

Digger notes this horrifying statistic: The American Red Cross screens blood donors and has seen a dramatic rise in the detection of the parasite Trypanosoma cruzi over the past 10 years in the Los Angeles area. In 1996, 1 in 9,850 donors were infected. In 1998, 1 in 5,400 donors were infected. In 2006, the infection rate of donors in the Los Angeles area had went to 1 in 3,800 donors.

It needs to stop now. This is why you check immigrants at the door for dangerous and infectious diseases, those laws have been on the books as long as we've been a country.

We are under no obligation to die because other countries cannot, and more importantly, will not get their acts together. It is not compassion that drives this, it is rank stupidity. Would it be compassionate for a doctor treating someone with Ebola to take off the spacesuit and lick them?

No, it would be stupid, as this is stupid. I reiterate, we are under precisely no obligation to die alongside our cheerful invaders who evade health screenings at the door. Ask yourself this, what if someone with Hemorrhagic fever managed to enter this country? It's not only not impossible it becomes more and more likely every day.

H/T Digger

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