Pat Dollard | Young Americans

Right after WWI my war-torn Hungarian Great-Grandmother packed up what she and her young children could carry and immigrated to the United States where my Great-Grandfather had been living and working and planning for them to join him. (Imagine being so far away from your family … your family caught in the middle of a World War and fending for themselves … Which explains WHY my Great-Grandfather refused to EVER again be separated from his wife once they were reunited … refused to go to the hospital when he fell extremely ill and the doctor in a house call told him his appendix had ruptured … and he died at home in their bed.)

At what point do we start taking things seriously, and stop the people that hide behind the ‘race card’ to stand in the way of halting such dangerous things before they become epidemic?

Leprosy (Hansen’s Disease) Background and Information

A little over a year ago CNN’s Lou Dobbs became alarmed by this ‘outbreak’ of leprosy in side our country, but liberal groups were swift in their backhand to slap him down … The “Southern Poverty LAw Center” in particular:

Subject: Tell Lou Dobbs to get his facts straight

May 15, 2007

Dear Friend,

Given that Mr. Dobbs refuses to retract his leprosy claim, we believe it is CNN’s responsibility to do so. We feel so strongly about this that we’ve placed open letters in today’s New York Times and USA Today calling for CNN to correct the record on Mr. Dobbs’ show.

(Read the rest)

CNN - Lou Dobbs Transcript - Aired May 7, 2007

DOBBS: Last night on “60 Minutes,” Leslie Stahl profiled me and this broadcast. And I thought it was a terrific job. My compliments to all at “60 Minutes” who worked on it.

I think they were fair. And as you would expect on “60 Minutes,” they did take a couple of shots.

This fellow — there he is, Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, he told “60 Minutes” what he thought about my advocacy journalism. He said — and we quote — “The impression you get, pretty strongly I think, day after day” — day after day — “is that sort of all 11 million illegal aliens are bringing leprosy, they’re bringing crime, they’re bringing all these terrible things to the United States.”

“But that does not sort of give one the go-ahead to say that, you know, ‘These are a group of rapists and disease-carrying people who are coming to, you know, essentially destroy the culture of this country.’ You know, I think that’s a long leap.”

Well, Mr. Potok, that is not only taking a leap. You just took a plunge from the facts.

First of all, I’ve never said anything remotely resembling what you suggested. And of the numbers of reports, the hundreds and hundreds of reports we’ve done on the issue of illegal immigration on this broadcast over the past four and a half years, well, I decided to find out, and I asked our staff to compute how many of them dealt with disease or other illnesses and illegal aliens.

By the way, the number, Mr. Potok, is three. That’s three over a period of four and a half years. What happened to your “day in and day out”?

And by the way, Mr. Potok, three of our reports covered rape or sexual predators in the context of illegal immigration in this country.

And there was a question about some of your comments, Christine. Following one of your reports, I told Leslie Stahl, we don’t make up numbers, and I will tell everybody here again tonight, I stand 100 percent behind what you said.

ROMANS: That’s right, Lou. We don’t make up numbers here. This is what we reported.

We reported, “It’s interesting, because the woman in our piece told us that there were about 900 cases of leprosy for 40 years. There have been 7,000 in the past three years. Leprosy in this country.”

I was quoting Dr. Madeline Cosman, a respected medical lawyer and medical historian writing in the “Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons”.

She said, “Hansen’s disease” — that’s the other modern name, I guess, for leprosy — “Hansen’s disease was so rare in the 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” — Lou.

DOBBS: It’s remarkable that this — whatever confusion, or confoundment over 7,000 cases, they actually keep a registry of cases of leprosy. And the fact that it rose was because — one assumes — because we don’t know for sure — but two basic influences — unscreened illegal immigrants coming into this country primarily from South Asia, and secondly, far better reporting.

ROMANS: That’s what Dr. Cosman told us — Lou.

DOBBS: And, you know, in talking with a number of people, it’s also very clear, no one knows but nearly everyone suspects there are far more cases of that. It’s also, I think, interesting, and I think important to say, one of the reasons we screen people coming into this country is to deal with communicable diseases like leprosy, tuberculosis. The fact is, if we would just screen successfully, all of those diseases can be treated effectively, efficiently and relatively quickly.

ROMANS: And that’s why we raised the questions in the first place, asking some tough questions about this. And, you know, 7,000 cases, active cases of leprosy, by no means is 11 million, as Mark Potok suggested.

DOBBS: But you can’t say that to people so interested in the truth, as Mr. Potok obviously isn’t. Thank you very much. Christine Romans.

Leprosy in America: new cause for concern

By Ben Whitford - (JSCMS- Columbia) - March 15, 2005

http://jscms.jrn.columbia.edu/cns/2005-03-15/whitford-americanleprosy

In her senior year of high school, Nicole Holmes, a Trinidadian immigrant living in Atlanta, Ga., fell heavily against a balance beam during gym class. She thought nothing more of it–but a few days later developed a rash on her knee, which was still numb and tingling where she had knocked it. “I could stick a needle in it and I wouldn’t feel it,” she said.

Baffled, her doctor took a biopsy. And, although by now Holmes suspected something was seriously amiss, she was still shocked when the doctor told her what was wrong.
She had leprosy.

A new case of leprosy, also known as Hansen’s disease, is diagnosed somewhere in the world every 60 seconds, but in the United States outbreaks remain rare. Only about 130 new cases are discovered each year, mostly among immigrants from areas such as Mexico, India or the Caribbean, where the disease is more widespread.

Over 100 cases were found in immigrants last year, more than double the number in 2000, and, while the number of cases is still comparatively small, some researchers believe the trend could lead to leprosy spreading to the U.S.-born population.

“It’s creeping into the U.S.,” said Dr. William Levis, head of the New York Hansen’s Disease Clinic. “This is a real phenomenon. It’s a public health threat. New York is endemic now, and nobody’s noticed.”

Tracking leprosy among immigrants can be difficult, but leprosy is already endemic in Texas, and numbers are rising in New York and California–all states with high immigrant populations. Dr. Levis said he believes America could be on the brink of an epidemic similar to those that swept Brazil and led to the country becoming a global leprosy hotspot.

“We just don’t know when these epidemics are going to occur,” he said. “But we’re on the cusp of it here, because we’re starting to see endemic cases that we didn’t see 25 years ago.”

At present, only about two dozen new cases of leprosy are found in US-born patients each year, a number that has not changed for decades, said Steve Pfeifer, head of statistics and epidemiology at the National Hansen’s Disease Program.

But the short time between many immigrants’ entry to the US and their diagnosis with leprosy suggests that some immigrants, mostly from Mexico, may now be coming to the U.S. specifically to seek treatment, Pfeifer said.

“They’re coming to be treated because they get treatment free and probably get better treatment here,” he said. “Somebody down there diagnoses them and says, ‘Hey, you’ve got leprosy, and your best course of action is probably high-tailing to the U.S.’”

Since the disease remains contagious until patients receive their first course of medication, an influx of diagnosed but untreated patients could lead to leprosy spreading into the US-born population.

Pfeifer said he had not made an official report on the trend for fear that anti-immigrant groups would call for a crackdown on centers providing free care for illegal aliens. He stressed that people with leprosy become non-infectious almost immediately after they receive treatment–and that most people who are exposed to leprosy in others never succumb to the disease.

Dr. Terry Williams, who runs a Houston-based clinic serving leprosy patients across southern Texas, said that the bulk of the cases treated by his clinic were immigrants. “A lot of our cases are imported,” he said. “We see patients from everywhere–Africa, the Philippines, China, South America.”

And at least some of those patients, he confirmed, were coming to the U.S. specifically to seek treatment. “Certainly we do see some of that,” he said. “We’ve had even a couple of patients from Cuba who were put on a boat by Castro just to get them out of the country–they made their way here through Mexico and Central America basically just to get treated.”

“We treat them; our job isn’t to be immigration police,” he added.

Not all experts are so worried about an impending epidemic. Dr. Denis Daumerie, head of the World Health Organization’s leprosy elimination program, said fears that immigrants might lead to a resurgence of leprosy in the US were a little overblown. “There is no risk of an epidemic of leprosy,” he said. “There’s absolutely no risk that the few immigrants who are affected by the disease, if they are diagnosed and treated, will spread the disease in the US.”

The problem, researchers say, is that leprosy isn’t easy to diagnose, especially for doctors with no previous experience of the disease. American doctors often mistake it for other conditions like eczema or diabetes; and one recent study found that the average patient shows symptoms of leprosy for over two years before receiving an accurate diagnosis.

That means people remain infectious for longer–and are more likely to suffer serious health problems as a result of the disease. “You tend to find a higher disability rate in low-endemic countries because people don’t know about leprosy,” said Christopher Doyle, president of the American Leprosy Mission. “It’s out of sight, out of mind. People just don’t think about leprosy in the United States.”

For those who do receive timely treatment, however, prospects are good.

After a long course of medication, and extensive physical therapy, Nicole Holmes from Trinidad has regained sensation in her knee. She still has a few marks that won’t clear up, but she can pass them off as birthmarks if anyone asks.

Holmes will always have to be on the lookout for a return of the symptoms, but she gave birth recently and is now more concerned about raising her young son.

“If it’s going to happen it’s going to happen,” she said. “I just have to continue living.”

Nine cases of leprosy in Springdale, Arkansas
Feb 9, 2008

Arkansas Leprosy Outbreak Blamed on Lax Border Control
Gateway Pundit Feb. 8, 2008

Three Indigenous Cases of Leprosy in the Mississippi Delta
July 17, 2008

Tip of the iceberg being ignored and poo-pooed. “google” it if you care to look deeper …