The Next Pandemic: The Ticking Time Bomb of Diseases from Unscreened Undocumented Immigrants Spread Throughout the USA

DISCLAIMER: NOTHING HEREIN SHOULD BE CONSTRUED AS MEDICAL ADVICE. ONLY A LICENSED PHYSICIAN CAN GIVE YOU ADVICE AND YOU SHOULD CONSULT WITH HIM OR HER. THIS PAPER IS FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY. By David William Jedell September 6, 2022 Why did I come down with cholera after visiting New Jersey? (I got rid of it in three days with high doses of colloidal silver but suffered greatly the first night.) Will I get COVID or Monkeypoax? Cholera is an acute, diarrheal illness caused by infection of the intestine with the toxigenic bacterium Vibrio cholerae serogroup O1 or O139. An estimated 2.9 million cases and 95,000 deaths occur each year around the world. The infection is often mild or without symptoms, but can sometimes be severe. Approximately one in 10 (10%) infected persons will have severe disease characterized by profuse watery diarrhea, vomiting, and leg cramps. In these people, rapid loss of body fluids leads to dehydration and shock. Without treatment, death can occur within hours. https://www.cdc.gov/cholera/general/index.html Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons America’s inadequate federal border enforcement permits massive daily border penetrations that violate the integrity of our medicine and our national security. The influx of illegal aliens has serious hidden medical consequences. We judge reality primarily by what we see. But what we do not see can be more dangerous, more expensive, and more deadly than what is seen. Illegal aliens stealthy assaults on medicine now must rouse Americans to alert and alarm. By default, we grant health passes to illegal aliens. Yet many illegal aliens harbor fatal diseases that American medicine fought and vanquished long ago, such as drug-resistant tuberculosis, malaria, leprosy, plague, polio, dengue, and Chagas disease. https://www.jpands.org/vol10no1/cosman.pdf Understanding where international migrants are relocating is critical, given the association between human mobility and the spread of infectious diseases. Outbreaks of measles, diphtheria and malaria have been reported across Venezuela and other diseases, such as HIV and tuberculosis, are resurgent. The ongoing economic and political crisis in Venezuela has resulted in a collapse of the healthcare system and the re-emergence of previously controlled or eliminated infectious diseases. There has also been an exodus of Venezuelan international migrants in response to the crisis. https://academic.oup.com/jtm/article/25/1/tay077/5091517 A nation's likelihood of experiencing, identifying and reporting an outbreak is influenced by its surveillance capabilities, communication infrastructure, geography and availability of hosts for pathogens. Map of global outbreak diversity for the nations of the world over time. Diversity is calculated for each nation using Shannon's diversity index (SDI) as described in the methods. Nations with the highest diversity of outbreaks are represented by larger values and darker shading. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsif.2014.0950 It is hard to completely ignore the health risks posed by those whose entry into the country avoids medical examination and treatment. tuberculosis. Conditions such as, tuberculosis, HIV and syphilis, pose significant infectious risks. The estimate of TB is that there are over 2,300 infected Mexican illegal immigrants currently living in the United States. 2010 Pew Research Center estimatesrank states with the highest estimated percentage of illegal immigrant residents as Nevada (7.2% of the population), California (6.8%), Texas (6.7%), New Jersey (6.2%), and Arizona (6.0%). 2015 CDC rankingsof known tuberculosis cases per 100,000 population list these states as Nevada at #10, California #3, Texas #4, New Jersey #6, and Arizona #13. This is why for decades and still today, the United States demands that prior to being allowed entrance into our country, those wishing to immigrate must undergo a thorough, well-defined medical history and physical examinationperformed by a recognized, qualified physician, a medical evaluation that includes blood work and a chest X-ray. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “The purpose of the mandated [pre-immigration] medical examination is to detect inadmissible conditions, including communicable diseases of public health significance, mental disorders associated with harmful behavior, and substance use or substance-induced disorders.” Threatening infectious agents don’t care whether their host body enters America legally via JFK International Airport or slips unnoticed across the Arizona desert in the pre-dawn hours. It’s all the same to our microscopic predators. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/patient-power/201701/do-illegal-immigrants-pose-health-risk-us-all Dr. Marc Siegel wrote in USA Today that “thousands of children now being housed in makeshift detention centers have been reported to suffer from large outbreaks of scabies, a highly contagious, itchy rash spread by tiny insects known as mites.” There also have been reports of outbreaks of lice, measles, flu, drug-resistant tuberculosis, dengue fever and Zika, Siegel added. https://healthjournalism.org/blog/2018/06/separated-migrant-children-face-infectious-disease-and-other-health-threats/ Legal immigrants and refugees must provide mandatory proof of vaccination for measles, mumps, rubella, polio, tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis, hepatitis A and B, rotavirus, meningococcus, chicken pox, pneumonia, and seasonal flu. Actual public-health experts across the Southwest have noted rises in drug-resistant TB and dengue fever. In June, Australian public-health researchers reported that “scabies, long considered a disease of the past in the developed world, is making its way back.” The scientists pointed to mass global migration as a leading factor, noting scabies outbreaks among refugees to the European Union and along America’s southern border. And in Germany, federal epidemiologists reported that since opening the floodgates to migrants in 2015, data show “increased incidences in Germany of adenoviral conjunctivitis, botulism, chicken pox, cholera, cryptosporidiosis, dengue fever, echinococcosis, enterohemorrhagic E. coli, giardiasis, haemophilus influenza, Hantavirus, hepatitis, hemorrhagic fever, HIV/AIDS, leprosy, louse-borne relapsing fever, malaria, measles, meningococcal disease, meningoencephalitis, mumps, paratyphoid, rubella, shigellosis, syphilis, toxoplasmosis, trichinellosis, tuberculosis, tularemia, typhus and whooping cough.” https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/its-not-unreasonable-to-be-worried-about-disease-and-the-caravan/ The number of measles cases in the U.S. this year has broken a record, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Thursday, May 30, 2019, warning that the virus may no longer be considered to have been eliminated in this country if the large outbreaks continue through the fall. The CDC said 971 cases have been reported so far in 2019, including 91 cases in the past week and a half. The tally means in just five months the outbreaks have surpassed the previous high of 963 cases set 25 years ago, in 1994. https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-measles-cases-set-record-11559242458 The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention detected more than 220 cases last year of a rare breed of “nightmare bacteria” that are virtually untreatable and capable of spreading genes that make them impervious to most antibiotics. CDC’s principal deputy director, said she was surprised by the extent of the spread. “As fast as we have run to slow (antibiotic) resistance, some germs have outpaced us.We need to do more and we need to do it faster and earlier.”One in 4 germ samples sent to the lab network contained special genes that allowed them to spread their resistance to other germs, the CDC said. In 1 in 10 cases, people infected with these germs spread the disease to apparently healthy people in the hospital — such as patients, doctors or nurses — who in turn can act as silent carriers of illness, infecting others even if they don’t become sick. Nightmare bacteria — those that are resistant to almost every drug — are particularly deadly in seniors and people with chronic illnesses. Up to half of the resulting infections prove fatal. While those bacteria are terrifying on their own, the “unusual” genes discussed in this report are truly the “worst of the worst,” said a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security. About 2 million Americans are sickened by antibiotic-resistant bacteria each year and 23,000 die, according to the CDC. “There are certain bacterial genes that are more worrisome than others, that are much harder to treat,” Adalja said. “These genes are lurking in American patients and they are spreading in hospitals and health care facilities.” Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, compared the problem to a “slow-moving tsunami.” “This isn’t an acute crisis where a wave just hits you,” Osterholm said. “But we see these rare cases of resistance in remote areas of the world, and within a year or two, it’s everywhere.” https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/04/03/nightmare-bacteria-antibiotic-resistant-stalk-hospitals/482162002/ Communicable and noncommunicable disease control remains a foreign policy challenge at international and national levels. For example, immigrant medical screening programs may be ill-equipped to identify and track significant public health concerns in arriving migrants, including chronic infectious diseases. International mobility is central to the globalization of infectious and chronic diseases. Despite the paucity of globally cohesive foreign policy in this area, the history of health and foreign policy reflects long-term links to migration issues. Underlying health threats associated with international population movements have driven the development of national and international border control health policies. These policies reflect the volumes and diversities of populations moving between countries and regions with wide disparities in disease risk and prevalence. Considerable attention is directed towards the containment of global disease threats of international importance. Significant international investment has been directed at infectious diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS. Migration and population mobility play a role in each public health challenge. https://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/85/3/06-036962/en/ What disease might these illegal border crossers be carrying? The CDC provides an answer. Studies have identified the importance of cross-border movement in the transmission of various diseases, including COVID, Monkeypox, HIV, measles, pertussis, rubella, rabies, hepatitis A, influenza, tuberculosis, shigellosis, syphilis, Mycobacterium bovis infection, brucellosis, and foodborne diseases, such as infections associated with raw cheese and produce. And let’s not forget that mysterious polio-like illness, AFM, caused by a virus (believed to be caused by a virus, specifically Enterococcus D68), much like many of the above-mentioned diseases, that has the CDC perplexed to the point of needing a task force to formulate a politically correct explanation and solution. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recently announced the formation of a task force to investigate a new mysterious illness afflicting primarily children. Acute flaccid myelitis (AFM) is a polio-like illness believed to be caused by a virus. But in contrast to polio, which has been mostly eradicated, except in a few pockets around the globe, AFM is on the rise. The disease sleuths at the CDC are befuddled. Unlike in the movie The Andromeda Strain, where a crack team of scientists, within a few days, identified and cured a mysterious illness from far beyond the reaches of our galaxy, a bureaucratic behemoth full of scientists is stumped. When a government agency either does not know the answer, or for political reasons does not want to acknowledge and reveal the answer, they form a task force. https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/11/the_migrant_caravan_of_diseases.html Border Patrol Agent: US Faces Ebola Threat Via Southern Border National Border Patrol Council spokesman Gabe Pacheco told Fox 5 in San Diego that 6 percent of travelers to the U.S. from the region in West Africa hardest hit by the deadly disease will cross the borders on foot without a visa. https://www.newsmax.com/headline/ebola-us-mexico-border/2014/10/22/id/602319/ Border Patrol reveals that it is getting slammed daily with dozens of illegal immigrants carrying “serious illnesses.” This includes tuberculosis, influenza, pneumonia and parasites. In fact, a Guatemalan migrant who died in U.S. custody on Christmas Eve had Influenza B, a virus that causes respiratory infections. Federal agents are referring 50 illegal immigrants a day for urgent medical care, according to figures obtained by The Washington Times (https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/dec/31/number-sick-kids-soars-border/). Authorities say “it’s unlike anything they’ve ever seen before.” Many of the migrants have tuberculosis, parasites or the flue, the feds confirm. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner Kevin McAleenan said that most of the illegal immigrants were sick when they arrived at the U.S. border. “Many were ill before they departed their homes,” McAleenan said. “We’re talking about cases of pneumonia, tuberculosis, parasites. These are not things that developed urgently in a matter of days.” The health crisis created by the influx of Venezuelans fleeing to neighboring countries is spreading malaria, yellow fever, diphtheria, dengue, tuberculosis and AIDS throughout South America. Years ago, when Barack Obama let tens of thousands of illegal immigrant minors into the country, health experts warned about the serious hazards to the American public. Most of the Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) came from Central America, like the current caravan, and they crossed into the U.S. through Mexico, in the same way that the caravan expects to. Swine flu, dengue fever and Ebola were among the diseases that the hordes of UACs brought with them, according to lawmakers and medical experts interviewed by Judicial Watch during the influx. At the time, a U.S. Congressman, who is also a medical doctor, told Judicial Watch about the danger to the American public as well as the Border Patrol agents forced to care for the UACs. The former lawmaker, Phil Gingrey, referred to it as a “severe and dangerous” crisis because the Central American youths were importing infectious diseases considered to be largely eradicated in this country. Many migrants lack basic vaccinations such as those to prevent chicken pox or measles, leaving America’s young children and the elderly particularly susceptible, Gingrey pointed out then. To handle the escalating health crisis the CDC activated an Emergency Operations Center (EOC) that largely operated in secrecy. https://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2014/07/illegal-alien-minors-spreading-tb-ebola-dengue-swine-flu/ Immigrants are being shuttled around the country and temporarily kept wherever the Department of Homeland Security can warehouse them. States as far as Massachusetts are unwitting hosts. Most troubling is that there is no apparent recognition of severe danger to public health they may pose. A doctor who is a public health expert working for the National Institute of Health told me: "These thousands of children have traveled long distances and have been exposed to a variety of physical and infectious hardships at home or during their journey. Their immune systems are stressed. They are reportedly carrying lice, scabies and probably other parasites. Some illegals are reportedly carrying deadly diseases such as antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis. Without proper screening and treatment of these children and others with them, there could be new outbreaks of diseases that historically occur with crowding: meningitis, flu, diarrhea, cholera, polio and others." (The doctor requested anonymity because he, like other federal public health professionals, is not permitted to comment on the record about this obvious problem.) https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/obama-administration-hides-the-dangerous-consequences-of-illegal-immigration Of the 6,000 “migrants” in a Caravan, more than 2,220 were ill with AIDS, chickenpox, and tuberculosis. They also had lice, which carries the typhus bacterium, Rickettsia prowazekii, and some might well have been sick with American trypanosomiasis, also known as Chagas disease. Last year, the National Center for Biotechnology Information reported that 37,684 immigrants with TB entered the United States between 2005 and 2009. Most, more than 9,000, came from Mexico. Of more concern, however, than TB generally are the multi-drug resistant cases that came in: 482. In the first month of 2019, border agents have dealt with more than 1,500 sick illegal aliens. https://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/immigration/item/31457-migrants-bringing-in-communicable-disease-seven-with-mumps-in-houston The term “Mass Casualty” refers to a combination of patient numbers and care requirements that challenge or exceed a community’s ability to provide adequate patient care using day-to-day operations. https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/medialibraries/urmcmedia/flrtc/documents/wny-hospital-medical-surge-planning-for-mass-casualty-incidents.pdf Travelers infected in the territories and Latin America accounted for >90% of the dengue, chikungunya, and Zika virus disease cases. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/67/wr/mm6717e1.htm?s_cid=mm6717e1 Zika, chikungunya, and West Nile viruses with a steady increase in Lyme disease cases. https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/vector-borne/index.html Of the 5,200 detainees in quarantine across those centers, around 4,200 are for exposure to mumps. Around 800 were exposed to chicken pox and 100 have been exposed to both. https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/14/politics/mumps-chicken-pox-quarantine-ice/index.html Globalization compounds the risk: Airplanes now carry almost 10 times as many passengers around the world as they did four decades ago. In the ’80s, HIV showed how potent new diseases can be, by launching a slow-moving pandemic that has since claimed about 35 million lives. In 2003, another newly discovered virus, sars, spread much more rapidly. A Chinese seafood seller hospitalized in Guangzhou passed it to dozens of doctors and nurses, one of whom traveled to Hong Kong for a wedding. In a single night, he infected at least 16 others, who then carried the virus to Canada, Singapore, and Vietnam. Within six months, sars had reached 29 countries and infected more than 8,000 people. This is a new epoch of disease, when geographic barriers disappear and threats that once would have been local go global. The H7N9 strain currently circulating in China has a fatality rate of 40 percent. Yet just 10 years ago, while experts fretted about H5N1 in birds in the East, new strains of H1N1 were evolving within pigs in the West. One of those swine strains jumped into humans in Mexico, launching outbreaks there and in the U.S. in early 2009. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/when-the-next-plague-hits/561734/ SARS began to spread internationally to Singapore, Vietnam, the Philippines, Australia, and Canada. In early 2003, severe acute respiratory syndrome spread to 29 countries, killing nearly 10 percent of the people it infected. No drug could stop SARS, and the disease propagated wildly through the ranks of healthcare workers. One patient, a “super-spreader,” infected 143 people, including every one of the 50 doctors and nurses who treated him. Eerie scenes of Chinese cities being disinfected by spray trucks and Canadian doctors in full biological containment gear flashed on television screens around the world. At the height of the epidemic, one Canadian infectious-disease expert who had come down with SARS herself predicted that the virus would spread around the globe: “If we don’t have a vaccine—yes, we are all going to get it,” she told Canadian television. Her opinion was shared by many that spring. With symptoms resembling those of a common cold or garden-variety flu, SARS frequently escaped diagnosis, aiding its spread. And once the symptoms did become known to the public, every cough in a subway or a plane was suspect. Then SARS became a super-spreader of another sort, a scourge of national economies: it became a carrier of fear itself, with costs measured in billions of dollars. Even as SARS cases were dropping in hospitals, where the outbreak was concentrated, community transmission continued: people with no known SARS contacts were still getting SARS. Viruses are incapable of reproducing on their own. At their core, they are a set of instructions, encoded in RNA, that instruct the machinery of a cell to make more virus. Some, like polio, are “naked viruses,” little more than the RNA itself. But most of the medically important viruses are encapsulated, says Farzan, meaning they are surrounded by a fatty lipid membrane. These “enveloped viruses” use a standard mechanism for gaining entry into cells that was worked out during the 1980s and 1990s by Harvard’s late Loeb professor of biochemistry and biophysics Don C. Wiley in the course of creating a model for understanding flu. “The level of work he did on this was worth the Nobel Prize,” says Farzan, who considers himself fortunate to have taken classes with Wiley. “He established a model for this very broad class of proteins that mediate the fusion of the cell membrane and the viral membrane,” Farzan says. “These are negatively charged repulsive membranes, so they don’t want to get together.” To overcome this repulsion, proteins reaching out from the virus interact with proteins on the cell surface, and together they undergo a change that forms a clamp, forcing the virus and cell together. What happens next “is a little bit magic,” says Farzan: the lipid membranes mix and an aqueous pore forms between the two. This becomes a neck that tends to expand. Once the neck is large enough, the viral capsid enters the cell, bringing with it the biogenetic material that initiates the process of replication. https://harvardmagazine.com/2007/03/the-sars-scare.html The number of Americans sickened each year by bites from infected mosquitoes, ticks or fleas tripled from 2004 through 2016, with infection rates spiking sharply in 2016 as a result of a Zika outbreak, U.S. health officials said on Tuesday.The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that some 96,075 diseases caused by bites by mosquitoes, ticks and fleas were reported in 2016, up from 27,388 in 2004, in an analysis of data from the CDC’s National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System. Infections in 2016 went up 73 percent from 2015, reflecting the emergence of Zika, which is transmitted by mosquitoes and can cause severe birth defects. Zika was the most common disease borne by ticks, mosquitoes and fleas reported in 2016, with 41,680 cases reported, followed by Lyme disease, with 36,429 cases, almost double the number in 2004. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-health-insectillness/tick-mosquito-borne-infections-surge-in-united-states-cdc-idUSKBN1I2423 An infectious disease threat is unique because of the transmissibility of diseases and the mobility of human populations, among other reasons. Infectious disease threats in recent years—such as Zika and Ebola outbreaks—have heightened the United States' attention to future potential threats, and raised questions about the nation's preparedness and response capabilities. https://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-18-362 The association between poverty and communicable disease is evident from a cursory exercise in cartography. The maps of those living on less than two dollars a day and the epidemiology of HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis (TB), and many other infectious diseases coincide nearly exactly. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3168775/ Enteric diseases cause gastrointestinal symptoms such as diarrhea and vomiting and may be accompanied by fever. Many enteric diseases are spread by contaminated food, but most have more than one way they can be transmitted, such as from poor handwashing (fecal-oral). Enteric have increased risk for outbreaks. As the U.S. food supply has become less local, with foods coming from all over the country and around the world, the potential for widespread outbreaks affecting thousands of people has grown. Vibriosis means infection with bacteria in the genus Vibrio. Cholera is a member of this genus but is not found normally in the US. Incidence Rates, Vibriosis, MontgomeryCounty, Maryland, and U.S., 2013-17 went virtually straight up. https://www.montgomerycountymd.gov/HHS/Resources/Files/Infectious%20Disease%20Report_10-15-18_FINAL.pdf Recently in the U.S., the number of people getting sick from certain ailments has risen. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/global-infections-by-the-numbers/ Infectious-disease experts in East Asia are preparing for this year’s wave of a lethal tick-borne virus. The virus causes a disease called severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome (SFTS), which has affected a rapidly growing number of people since it emerged nearly a decade ago. Scientists in the region say they are worried by the rising incidence of the disease, and by signs that the virus can spread more easily than previously thought. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-04486-6 As more people travel around the world, the risk of spreading viruses to new territories rises. “West Nile virus was introduced to New York City around 1999. The same thing happened with the Zika virus, which we never had here before 2015. We’re not quite sure of the origin, but it was probably through a person who had the virus.” https://www.everydayhealth.com/lyme-disease/diseases-carried-ticks-mosquitoes-fleas-triple-us/ Typhus, a bacterial infection that is sometimes life threatening, is on the rise in Los Angeles and several other U.S. cities. Public health officials say homelessness is making the problem worse and that the disease, which is associated with poverty and poor sanitation, is making a comeback in the United States. The reason for increased typhus numbers may be linked to migration. In some parts of the world, typhus is still linked to war and instability, such as “in the conflict zones in the Middle East, in North Africa, Central Asia, East Africa, Venezuela, for instance with the political instability there.” https://www.voanews.com/a/typhus-cases-rise-in-los-angeles-several-other-us-cities/4621679.html Contrary to widely held beliefs, developing countries are increasingly suffering from high levels of public health problems related to chronic diseases. In five out of the six regions of WHO, deaths caused by chronic diseases dominate the mortality statistics. Although human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS), malaria and tuberculosis, along with other infectious diseases, still predominate in sub-Saharan Africa and will do so for the foreseeable future, 79% of all deaths worldwide that are attributable to chronic diseases are already occurring in developing countries. https://www.who.int/nutrition/topics/2_background/en/ Microbes evolve about 40 million times as fast as humans do, and we are losing ground. “Of all the things that can kill millions of people in very short order,” says Dr. Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, “the one that is most likely to occur over the next 10 years is a pandemic.” http://time.com/4766624/next-global-security/ Hepatitis C now kills more people in the United States than every other infectious disease combined, according to new government data. The report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that deaths associated with hepatitis C reached an all-time high of 19,659 in 2014, surpassing the total combined number of deaths from 60 other infectious diseases reported to CDC, including HIV, pneumococcal disease, and tuberculosis. https://www.10tv.com/article/most-deadly-infectious-disease-america-today In March/April 2009, a new swine-origin strain of influenza A/H1N1 virus (pH1N1) was detected in human populations in California and Mexico. The U.S. government declared a Public Health Emergency on April 26, 2009, followed on June 12 by a declaration of a global pandemic by the World Health Organization. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0016094 Typhus In October, L.A. County officials declared a typhus outbreak in downtown L.A. around skid row. The announcement prompted calls to clean up the streets and find housing for the city’s homeless population, which has burgeoned in recent years. Thirteen people in the state were diagnosed with typhus in 2008, compared with 167 last year. More than 95% of the people falling sick in California are in Los Angeles and Orange counties. In October, L.A. County officials declared a typhus outbreak in downtown L.A. around skid row. The announcement prompted calls to clean up the streets and find housing for the city’s homeless population, which has burgeoned in recent years.Typhus is often linked to unsanitary conditions and overcrowding, experts say. Animals including rats and cats carry the disease in their bodies, though it doesn’t make them ill. Fleas transmit the disease to humans by biting the infected animals and then biting humans, something that could become more common as more people live on the streets. Dr. Stuart Cohen, chief of the division of infectious diseases at UC Davis, pointed out that a large outbreak of hepatitis A in San Diego that killed 20 people was also linked to the homeless population. “In major cities in the U.S., we hear about increasing numbers of encampments and people living in squalor,” said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a professor at UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health. “Those conditions are ideal for increase in vermin like rats.” “Once people are aware that it’s in their area, they might start considering it as the diagnosis, and that can lead to revealing more cases that were there already,” said Gilbert Kersh, the CDC’s chief of the Rickettsial Zoonoses branch, which focuses on bacterial diseases spread by fleas, lice and ticks. https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-ln-typhus-20190217-story.html At least one officer with the Los Angeles Police Department has contracted the bacteria that causes typhoid fever, Salmonella typhi, and another one is showing typhus-like symptoms https://abcnews.go.com/Health/lapd-officers-treated-typhoid-fever-typhus-symptoms/story?id=63371616 Filth from homeless camps are luring rats to L.A. City Hall https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-rats-homelessness-city-hall-fleas-report-20190603-story.html Microbial swab samples were collected from three boroughs (Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn) during June and July 2014, followed by generation of Illumina MiSeq datasets for bacterial (16S rRNA) and eukaryotic (18S rRNA) marker genes. Bacterial assemblages on ATM keypads were dominated by taxonomic groups known to be associated with human skin communities (Actinobacteria, Bacteroides, Firmicutes, and Proteobacteria) and pathogenic taxa (Toxoplasma, Trichomonas). In New York City, the surface area of urban surfaces in Manhattan far exceeds the geographic area of the island itself. We have only just begun to describe the vast array of microbial taxa that are likely to be present across diverse types of urban habitats. https://msphere.asm.org/content/1/6/e00226-16 Hospitals are busier, the patients have a wider range of ailments and the staff can be downright mean — on top of the usual list of stressors in a doctor’s life.In the darkest moments of her depressive episode, Dr. Carol Pak-Teng lay in bed for hours, struggling to summon up the energy to work another 12-hour shift in the emergency room. “There were moments where I thought, ‘If I just melted away into this bed, that wouldn’t be so bad,’ ” the 34-year-old recalls of that time in 2015. About a year later, another resident at the Manhattan hospital where Pak-Teng worked — whom she declines to name — died after jumping off its roof. There’s a dangerous epidemic among medical professionals: Forty-four percent of all doctors surveyed in a 2019 Medscape report said that they feel long-term, unresolvable job stress, detachment and burnout from their work. The problem is a national one, but New York City is a “hotbed” for doctor suicides. The hospitals are busier, the patients have a wider range of ailments. Outside of the city, conditions aren’t much better. As a medical student in 2014 near Buffalo, Dr. Hawkins Mecham found himself working nearly 100 hours a week. He barely had time to mentally process the deaths of his patients, and he found his supervisors emotionally abusive, as though his training was a “boot camp.” Not surprisingly, his marriage was also starting to crumble. “And then I just snapped,” the 33-year-old says. Mecham slit his wrists in a motel room, losing so much blood he passed out. When he woke up on the bathroom floor, he thought, “What in the world did I do?” before bandaging himself up and driving to the ER, he says. Even the early stages of burnout can impact care, says Dr. Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute and author of the 2018 report “A Crisis in Health Care: A Call to Action on Physician Burnout.” “Imagine going to see your doctor and he or she feels emotionally exhausted and disconnected, to the point where it’s hard for them to listen effectively or be empathetic,” Jha says. “Most physicians will work hard to counter that. But ultimately . . . burnout harms patients as well as doctors.” Yet some doctors are afraid to seek help. Pak-Teng — who in 2016 started working at a hospital in New Jersey where her schedule is lighter, and is an advocate for doctors’ mental health — was told to be discreet: Getting professional help meant she was confessing weakness, she was told, and could adversely affect her career. https://nypost.com/2019/02/19/a-burnout-epidemic-is-hurting-doctors-and-their-patients/ A burnout epidemic is hurting doctors — and their patients Dozens of NYS hospitals have already closed and 26 more are on the State’s distressed watch list. https://secureourcare.org/ L.A CountyHealth officials say they are monitoring three large clusters of highly contagious whooping cough among 11- to 18-year-olds. https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2019/02/27/whooping-cough-harvard-westlake/ “There’s another evolving strain [of West Nile Virus] that has been evolving in Texas and is now a permanent resident in Maricopa County as well.” https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-environment/2019/03/02/west-nile-permanent-arizona-ecosystem-mosquitoes/3004094002/ Officials with the Texas Department of State Health Services stated that 186 people in migrant detention centers located in Texas had confirmed cases of mumps.This was the highest number in 22 years. https://www.breitbart.com/border/2019/03/04/200-cases-of-mumps-confirmed-in-texas-migrant-detention-centers/ “More than 2,000 people in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody have been quarantined amid an outbreak of mumps and other diseases,” Geneva Sands, Michelle Lou, and Susan Scutti report for CNN. “The numbers of immigrants in custody with a contagious diseases has spiked in the past year. For the previous two years, the agency has not encountered a single case of mumps among its detainees." (March 12, 2019) https://www.whitehouse.gov/westwingreads/ Influenza-like illness: 32 states experienced high activity https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/index.htm It’s a public health disaster; just like a Third World environment. Typhus, Shigellosis, Lice, Hepatitis A, Hepatitis C, Syphilis, Flea-Borne Disease, Mental Illness, Substance Abuse Disorders, Tuberculosis, Alcoholism, Pneumonia. Infectious diseases—some that ravaged populations in the Middle Ages—are resurging in California and around the country, and are hitting homeless populations especially hard.https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/medieval-diseases-flare-as-unsanitary-living-conditions-proliferate/ Meningitis B At 18, Sara — a smart, loving and thoughtful girl — was a freshman at San Diego State University when, one Saturday in October of 2014, she called her parents to complain of a bad headache. By the time her parents reached her, within 36 hours she was brain dead. Meningococcal disease is primarily caused by five types of meningococcal bacteria — A, C, W, Y and B. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends children between ages 11 and 12 receive a meningococcal conjugate vaccine and receive a booster at 16 to prevent against serogroups A, C, W and Y. In addition, those age 16 to 23 can also receive a serogroup B meningococcal vaccine, the agency added. Three students in the fall of 2018 were diagnosed with meningitis B but survived. Sara received the meningococcal conjugate vaccine her father said, but not the serogroup B meningococcal vaccine. One of the main meningococcal serogroup B vaccines — Trumenba — was first licensed in the U.S. in 2014, before another — Bexsero — became available in 2015, per the Immunization Action Coalition. ER Wait Times Grow https://khn.org/news/as-er-wait-times-grow-more-patients-leave-against-medical-advice/ BP Agents Concerned Some Border Patrol agents in Texas are concerned about exposure to Ebola by a migrant fleeing the Democratic Republic of the Congo for the United States. But more of them are worried about other illnesses frequently popping up among detainees at stations across the southern border, according to union representatives. Border Patrol’s holding facilities are inundated with sick detainees, as well as sick agents. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/border-patrol-agents-not-immune-to-onslaught-of-illnesses-plaguing-migrant-holding-centers Cryptosporidium Public pools high rising amount of Cryptosporidium which can lead to life-threatening malnutrition and wasting - is usually spread by children who swim too soon after having suffered from diarrhea; germs can survive in chlorinated water for up to a week https://nypost.com/2019/07/01/cdc-warns-fecal-parasite-found-in-public-pools-is-on-the-rise/ The Lexington-Fayette County Health Department partnered with the CDC and the Kentucky Department of Health beginning in February to monitor people traveling to and from the Ebola outbreak region on the African continent, with the local department acting on guidance provided by the federal and state government bodies. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is a branch of the National Institutes of Health, sponsored a clinical trial beginning in late January at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital in Ohio to test Ebola vaccines. The Congo migrant “surge” at the southern border continues, as recently-landed Congo migrants in San Antonio, Texas described their six-month journey to the United States — during which time the government started making Ebola preparations instead of acting to stop the illegal migrant invasion. Given the current outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is the second largest Ebola outbreak in history with over 1,100 confirmed cases and 700 deaths, it is critical that the healthcare system is prepared to handle an actual case of Ebola or other infectious disease threat. https://bigleaguepolitics.com/cdc-federal-government-quietly-started-ebola-preparations-before-congo-migrant-invasion/ Hepatitis A is breaking out across the country Hepatitis A thrives in unsanitary conditions and spreads as easily as a stomach virus: People ingest minuscule amounts of an infected person’s stool from food, drinks, drug equipment or objects as commonplace as doorknobs. Burrell, who used to live in a tent but now stays at a friend’s house, believes he contracted the virus cleaning up trash left by fellow drug users without wearing gloves. Relentlessly, the virus continues its march across the nation. Pennsylvania declared an outbreak as recently as May. In early August, Florida and Philadelphia declared public health emergencies, case counts now exceed (only) 1,000 in six states. Hepatitis A, which infects liver cells and causes inflammation, can be mild or severe, and in rare cases leads to liver failure and death, especially in older people and those with other liver diseases. There’s no cure (except colloidal silver, duh); doctors advise rest, nutrition and fluids as it runs its course. Since 2016, the virus has spawned outbreaks in at least 29 states, starting with Michigan and California. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2019/08/10/hepatitis-vaccine-outbreak-spreads-shadows-opioid-epidemic/1967284001/ Mumps sickened hundreds of detained migrants in 19 states https://nypost.com/2019/08/30/mumps-sickens-hundreds-of-detained-migrants-in-19-states/ Copyright © 2022 David William Jedell Email: d.w.jedell@gmail.com