Illegal Aliens Bring TB to Bay Area...

Illegal Aliens Bring TB to Bay Area

Want sickness, both physically and emotionally, defend the use of illegal aliens for exploitive purposes.

Now we have an outbreak of illegal aliens. Too bad the San Jose Mercury News is refusing to tell the truth about the situation. The article says, "The current jump is due to a tuberculosis outbreak among Mexican day laborers in the Mission District, and has given San Francisco the highest TB rate in the state."

These are not Mexican day laborers—they are illegal aliens. If the newspaper can not tell its readers the truth about a TB outbreak, how can anyone trust them to tell the truth about crooked politicos (they should be called redistributive welfare workers?)

This article shows why we have a problem, the media, which we count on to tell us the truth is lying to us every day. Why buy a newspaper that you know lies in their news stories? This paper is committing suicide in front of us everyday. shame on the reporters and editors, they have turned from being journalists into old fashion propaganda artists. Would you hire someone that doesn’t tell the truth?

Report: Bay Area counties see major jump in TB cases

By Mike Swift, San Jose Mercury News, 3/13/08

In a trend that worried public health officials can’t fully explain, Santa Clara County and all other large Bay Area counties saw a substantial jump in new tuberculosis cases in 2007, even as California saw its overall caseload decline.

TB increased substantially in Santa Clara, San Francisco, Alameda and San Mateo counties, and those four Bay Area counties collectively had almost one-quarter of California’s 2,726 cases in 2007, according to new data released by the California Department of Public Health.

San Francisco experienced its first significant jump in cases since the AIDS-related TB outbreak in the early 1990s. The current jump is due to a tuberculosis outbreak among Mexican day laborers in the Mission District, and has given San Francisco the highest TB rate in the state. But Santa Clara County is close on its heels - ranking third in its rate of the airborne communicable disease.

Santa Clara County had more total cases - 241 - than San Francisco, trailing only much larger Los Angeles and San Diego counties within California. This is the first time since 1996 that Santa Clara County’s case totals have climbed two years in a row - the number of cases are up 21 percent over the past two years. While 2007 national data has not been released, Santa Clara County had more TB cases than 35 states in 2006.

"The trend is up. Will it continue? I don’t know, we certainly have a lot of new cases," said Dr. Marty Fenstersheib, Santa Clara County health Advertisement officer. "The sense is we’re still on track for this year, and it’s March. It continues to be a significant issue."

While California’s total TB caseload declined by 1.9 percent between 2006 and 2007, county TB controllers and statewide advocates said they are concerned about federal, state and local budget cuts that they say could weaken the state’s defenses against a global epidemic of a disease that causes 1.7 million deaths each year.

"We can’t afford to let our guard down or be lulled into a false sense of security," said Gwendolyn Young, chairwoman of the American Lung Association of California. "We are at the crossroads of a global epidemic, and this is going to have a significant impact on our state."

Two weeks ago, the World Health Organization reported the highest rates ever recorded of multi-drug resistant TB, strains of the illness that do not respond to several of the primary array of antibiotics used to treat the bacterial disease. WHO said there were cases of extremely-drug resistant TB (XDR) in 45 countries, cases that are resistant to all front-line drugs and that in come cases can be virtually incurable with current drugs. California has had 19 cases of XDR tuberculosis since 1993, lung association officials said.

Across the Bay Area, county TB officials said this week that they are worried about state and county budget cuts that they say could puncture California’s defenses against the evolving drug-resistant threat in the rest of the world, particularly in the former Soviet Union, China and India. TB officials say that in the early 1990s, the last time TB funding was substantially reduced, the cutbacks contributed to the major outbreaks in AIDS-related TB cases.

"The funding levels are dropping and so that worries me," Fenstersheib said, "that we’re going to have increased cases of multi-drug resistance, because we have no control over the rest of the world."

"I fear that with cutbacks in the state general fund, and cutbacks to the state’s TB program and to our local assistance grants, we will be increasingly less able to keep the numbers down," said Dr. Robert Benjamin, TB control officer for Alameda County. "It’s an insidious disease because it just lays dormant, and then it springs up to bite you."

As has been the pattern for more than a decade, the preponderance of Bay Area cases were in people who are foreign-born, including about 90 percent of the cases in Santa Clara County. While most TB cases are diagnosed soon after an immigrant, student or temporary worker arrives in the United States, people can live for decades with latent TB infection before getting sick and becoming infectious.

TB officials in both Alameda County and San Francisco said they had noticed an increase in geriatric cases among people who developed active TB as their aging immune systems weakened. One-third of TB cases in people over 65 in San Francisco were fatal in 2007, a trend the city TB controller, Dr. Masae Kawamura, called "really disturbing."

"They are fragile people, and TB just takes them down," she said.

The Bay Area has large populations of the five countries with the highest burden of TB - China, India, Vietnam, Mexico and the Philippines - but Kawamura and other local and statewide TB experts said public health officials will need to do more investigation to understand the Bay Area’s TB jump.

"I noticed the increase in the Bay Area, and it’s really concerning," Kawamura said. "It means we just need to increase our vigilance."