One such is Ebola, a mainly African disease that appeared in the US a few years ago when Ebola Tom traveled here from Liberia to get free First World medical care.
Below, a [...]]]>
One such is Ebola, a mainly African disease that appeared in the US a few years ago when Ebola Tom traveled here from Liberia to get free First World medical care.
Below, a map of Ebola cases in Africa from 2014.
Now Ebola is back, and Africans are coming here, along with everyone else on earth who has heard about America’s worsened border laxity. I reported the other day about an apparently healthy Cameroonian man who had gotten as far as southern Mexico on his way here. There’s 1.3 billion more on the continent he came from, so don’t think only Hondurans are coming.
Tucker Carlson discussed the topic last week with Fox’s explainer doctor, Marc Siegel, who focused on the medical implications.
Tucker asked whether it is now even politically “possible to block people coming from any other country in the world” in the face of danger to the American people from a killer epidemic. It sounds like not so much.
This is where the politically correct view of America as Welfare Office for the World has brought us: if any human on earth (currently 7.7 billion persons) has a health problem or wants a better job, then the United States has to admit them.
]]>TUCKER CARLSON: In other developing news tonight, there are new fears that Ebola could be heading to this country. One of the worst outbreaks of that horrifying disease in history is underway tonight and spreading fast. A thousand people have already died of Ebola in the Congo. It’s one of the deadliest infectious diseases known to man, of course, fewer than one third of the people who display symptoms survive.
Just five years ago, there was a major outbreak of Ebola that made it to our country. How concerned should we be if at all this time around? For those answers, we go to the man, we always go to NYU medical professor, Dr. Marc Siegel joins us tonight. Doctor, thanks very much for coming on.
DR. MARC SIEGEL: Hi, Tucker.
CARLSON: So this seems like a development really in in the history of Ebola, a thousand people. Should we be concerned?
SIEGEL: Yes, we should. And I’ll tell you why, Tucker, because it’s in an area of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where there is not an infrastructure, where there is militia swarming around over 119 Ebola clinics — they have been attacked by militia. So it’s a security problem in addition to a health problem.
It’s also erupting right now. We’ve had over 100 cases in the past week alone. You said a thousand deaths out of 1,500 cases over the last year. One hundred in the past week alone.
The World Health Organization is in the middle of this, but they don’t have money. There’s not enough vaccines. Here’s a good development since 2016: we now have a highly effective vaccine. It’s been given to a hundred thousand people; that may sound like a lot. It needs to be given to millions. We don’t have the vaccines, and people are dying without even knowing they have Ebola.
Forty percent of the deaths, Ebola is identified after the person dies. It is erupting. It’s spreading. It’s getting out of control.
CARLSON: Interesting. But Ebola, at least, as it has been explained in the Western media, it seems like it would be kind of hard to miss. I mean, you hemorrhage from various orifices. I mean, it’s horrible. And people don’t know they have it?
SIEGEL: They don’t know they have it because there’s no one around there identifying it. There’s no healthcare workers in the region. World Health Organization — people have been killed. It’s not a situation — granted, someone that knows infectious diseases or even medicine is going to be able to identify it.
Now again, it’s going to spread to neighboring countries, I believe. Here’s one positive thing about it. It’s very hard to spread. You can only spread it if you come in contact with secretions, with blood. So it’s not spread casually.
So even if a traveler were to bring it here, which happened in 2014, with Craig Spencer and others, it will only spread if proper precautions are taken. If another case, God forbid shows up in the United States, hopefully they’ll isolate that case, it won’t spread here.
But there, it’s an enormous problem. People themselves don’t know what it is. They know they have some serious, horrible disease. They don’t know it’s Ebola.
CARLSON: It’s unbelievable. Ebola, of course, is far from the only deadly communicable disease floating around the globe. Do you think politically it would be possible to block people coming from any other country in the world? Could we actually do anything in the face of an epidemic at this point?
SIEGEL: What we usually do in a case like this is we bring more and more of our workers in rather than blocking travelers. But if it gets to the point where I said a hundred cases in the past week, we were considering that back in 2014, if it gets to the point where we start having thousands and thousands of cases and nothing is being done internally.
Now, the Democratic Republic of Congo is trying to help. Their Health Ministry is doing a lot. But again the militias and the security problem there, UN Forces are there, but nothing with what we need. This is becoming not just a health issue, but also an issue of having to bring in armies and a mess — a total, total mess and it’s not diminishing, it’s growing and it’s going to spread to neighboring countries in Africa.
CARLSON: I’m not surprised at all. Doctor, thanks very much for your perspective. Great to see you.
The [...]]]>
Public health is a topic that gets little attention these days except for warnings about self-inflicted problems like obesity and alcoholism. The danger from infectious disease may seem like a distant memory or a Third World trouble. But now, open borders threaten all Americans with communicable illnesses once thought defeated by modern medical science.
The United States is becoming the Third World as it fills with its people and problems. Open borders are an invitation to billions of humans on earth.
There has been huge outrage in the liberal press about the deaths in the last month of two illegal alien kids while in US government custody. Democrat Presidential wanna-be Beto O’Rourke remarked on the situation, “I want to make sure that we put the well-being and welfare of those kids before any other concern.”
What about the well-being of American kids who are your constituents, Congressman O’Rourke?
America is not the welfare office for the world — it’s our home.
Dr. Marc Siegel discussed the problem of public health under siege during a recent interview on Fox News:
(Spare video here.)
]]>DR. MARC SIEGEL: Just in the last month alone: 5,000 unaccompanied children crossing the border illegally and 25,000 families. Well guess what — they have health problems. I mean, what’s going on in the camps down in Mexico — there’s flu around right now. I looked up flu in Mexico, there’s an upsurge of flu right now; there’s respiratory infections; there’s strep throats going on; there is mosquito-borne diseases that we see; dengue fever; there’s a risk of tuberculosis; there’s hepatitis. All this going on and we’re not screening, we’re not able to screen the people coming in, no matter how much the authorities try, no matter how much CDC now gets involved and also the US Coast Guard Med Corp was sent down there. That’s going to be an enormous help. It’s a humanitarian crisis because we can’t control the amount of people coming in.
KATIE PAVLICH: Doctor, the suggestion is that you have any concerns about the diseases that could be brought into United States by an unvetted caravan, that you’re bigoted, you’re not empathetic, but are these very serious health issues that everybody should be concerned about no matter what country you live in?
DR. SIEGEL: Well you’re talking to a physician here, and I don’t look at it politically. I say flu, let’s start with flu season. These are unvaccinated people; I say let’s try to vaccinate them. I’m not on TV saying let’s vaccinated everyone in the United States, but nobody’s vaccinated at the border, so they’re gonna spread influenza right now, they’re gonna spread respiratory infections, again the other the other diseases I mentioned. I think it’s a humanitarian crisis, but these are contagious diseases as well as other health problems that our hospitals aren’t equipped to deal with.
Now the eight-year-old boy was sent out from a New Mexico hospital with what I think was probably the flu — that’s the hospital’s fault, and Border Patrol is getting a lot of heat for that. They’re not physicians, and they have 1500 EMTs, emergency medical technicians, working for the Border Patrol that are there to screen people and get them to hospitals, but then the hospitals have to have the ability to take take care of them.
PETE HEGSETH: But all of it’s politicized, so this this young boy dies which we all agree is a tragedy and suddenly it’s it’s the policy of the United States. How do we get past that?
DR. SIEGEL: I think we get past that by talking about it right now just like this — that it’s actually a health crisis, it’s not a political crisis, and if you were to look at it politically you’d have to say that the United States has a long history of screening people. I can show you pictures from Ellis Island two hundred years ago where we’re looking for tuberculosis; doctors that didn’t even know what to do with it. Now we have the medical ability to treat these diseases, but we have to have the the physicians and the nurses in place to do so.
It’s a humanitarian crisis. It’s a disgrace to actually blame this on the Customs and Border Protection. What do they have to do with it? They’re doing tremendous work down there.
PAVLICH: The Department of Homeland Security is also been pressuring Mexico to start screening inside of their shelters, but can you talk a little bit about that?
DR. SIEGEL: Okay, because I don’t think we know what’s going on there.
PAVLICH: I don’t think we do, but can you talk a little bit about how disease can spread more rampantly when you have a large group of people who aren’t in the best sanitary conditions that we’ve seen in Tijuana, the shelters in Mexico as you just said, we don’t know exactly what’s going on. The shelters in the United States are far superior to the ones that they’re stopping in along the way whether it’s in tents or something else, so does make this situation worse?
DR. SIEGEL: So you just handled the medical side very well, definitely. I actually think that that’s what it is — it’s that they’re going from one camp to the next, we can’t track people, that they’re huddled close together, that there’s not proper hygiene. If you look inside of one of these stations, you see water, you see food, you see bedding, but not a lot of sanitation and not a lot of concern about it infectious disease.
Guess what happens — a cough travels 12 feet. If you have the flu, 25 percent of the people that you encounter get the flu. People are misdiagnosing these problems. Contagions will spread like wildfire in situations where there’s people huddled close together, especially if there’s heat there. We need more medical attention to this, not more political.
After all, America offers free healthcare with few strings attached to anyone on earth who gets [...]]]>
Breitbart has reported that Thomas Duncan (pictured), the Liberian ebola guy, came here knowingly in order to get top-notch healthcare in the US, apparently unbothered by potentially infecting many innocents along the way. Today’s Typhoid Mary is Ebola Tom.
After all, America offers free healthcare with few strings attached to anyone on earth who gets here with a compelling sob story. And Obamacare has been quietly expanded to include illegals, so they don’t even need a sob story in the newspaper to get their freebies.
There are numerous examples. One hint of the extent of medical mooching was a 2006 Denver Post article which observed, “Hundreds of Mexican illegal immigrants are in Colorado not just for work but also for free medical care they say they can`t get back home.” (Ill Mexican nationals go home, Denver Post, Nov 20, 2006)
This government-forced do-goodery is very expensive for taxpayers. Mexican Gabriela Perez was brought illegally to America by her parents to get treatment for her spina bifida. Medical care for that defect runs from $532,000 to above $1 million.
Illegal aliens also demand organ transplants, which are among the most expensive procedures, and 18 persons die daily waiting for the organ that never comes. One lucky recipient of organ transplants has to be Mexican Ana Puente who has received at least three liver transplants after her aunt brought her to the US illegally as an infant with a liver disorder. California taxpayers were dinged for around $490,000 for the operation and first-year follow-up, plus $30,000 annually for anti-rejection drugs.
It is ironic that thousands of Americans travel to Mexico to get affordable healthcare. Apparently the Mexes have first-world healthcare for those who have the money.
A danger in the present case is that Africans who fear they are infected will flee the ebola zone to this country to get American medical care that may save their lives. Not every African has the money to buy a one-way plane ticket to the US, but those who do would be encouraged by the fact that Obama scrapped medical quarantine regulations in 2010. As usual, the safety of American citizens is not a priority for this administration.
]]>Boss, Coworkers of US Ebola Patient: He Knew He Had Ebola, US Trip Was ‘Desperate Attempt to Survive’, Breitbart.com, October 3, 2014
A Liberian man who traveled to the United States four days before having contact with a symptomatic Ebola victim in Monrovia “knew he had Ebola,” according to his former boss as a FedEx contractor who said he abruptly left his job before the incident.
In interviews with the Liberian Observer, one of the nation’s largest newspapers, both Thomas Eric Duncan’s former boss, Henry Brunson, and an unnamed coworker agree that they believe Duncan knew he had Ebola when he boarded a plane out of Monrovia with a final destination in Texas. Brunson noted that, having come into contact with a pregnant woman who died hours after her interaction with Duncan, he knew of his disease. “If he were in Liberia, he was going to surely die,” Brunson told the paper, saying he was “glad” that Duncan was in a country with adequate medical resources.
Duncan worked as a driver for Brunson at the FedEx contractor SafeWay Cargo until mid-September. According to the Observer, Duncan was involved in a car accident at the end of the tenure at the company, and, according to workers, “having acquired an American visa, he did not care and never returned to work afterwards.”
Another unnamed source, described as a FedEx worker in Monrovia, told the Observer that Duncan knew he had Ebola, as well. “A source at FedEx in Monrovia said Mr. Duncan apparently knew he was suffering from the disease and that his best chance of survival was reaching to the United States,” writes author Omari Jackson, “a position that a family source denied, when we sought confirmation.” The Observer notes that the departure to America, for the source and others consulted, appeared a “desperate attempt to survive.”
In previous interviews with sources in Monrovia who know Duncan, the Observer found a witness who claimed Duncan had decided to “just go” to America after receiving a visa to visit family in the United States. The decision to leave his job and abruptly go to America raises questions about whether Duncan intended to honor the provisions of his visa and leave the United States in the alloted time.
Duncan’s direct knowledge of whether he had the disease is pivotal to understanding how rigorous screening measures at airports in Monrovia are, as well as whether any guilt can be ascribed to Duncan for knowingly violating any procedures in said screening. The Liberian government has announced its intention to prosecute Duncan for having left the country, stating that it has documentation in which Duncan claimed to have never come in contact with anyone carrying the Ebola virus and that such a lie is a criminal infraction.
Both American and Liberian officials agree that he did not exhibit any outward signs of having contracted Ebola during his airport screening, though debate remains surrounding whether his symptoms upon arriving in a Texas hospital were sufficiently clear that the hospital should have immediately quarantined him, rather than their initial decision to send him home with antibiotics.
UPDATE: FedEx has released the following statement clarifying Duncan’s position at SafeWay:
We have been advised by Safeway Cargo, a FedEx Global Service Provider (GSP) in Liberia, that Mr. Duncan was not employed in the FedEx GSP operation. He was employed as a personal driver for the company’s General Manager.