Prominent NYU Doctor Sounds Alarm on Illegals Bringing Deadly, Drug-Resistant Diseases to US: 'Porous Border Is Health Emergency'
Dr. Marc Siegel, a professor at New York University Medical School, warns that migrants crossing the U.S. southern border with Mexico are bringing contagious diseases into the country and creating a “public health emergency.”
Siegel recounted in an article published last week in USA Today that when his grandfather immigrated to the country from Poland in the early 1900s he first waited at Ellis Island where he could be screened for tuberculosis and other diseases.
Those with contagious diseases were not allowed entry into the U.S., not so with the migrants apprehended at the southern border.
“Migrants could be bringing infectious diseases across our southern border. When they are bussed to New York and elsewhere, these diseases go with them,” Siegel wrote.
“A recent study showed that more than 4% percent of migrants from Central and South America to Europe were sick with Chagas’ disease. It’s contagious without the help of an animal or a blood-sucking bug and can cause serious complications, including heart failure,” Siegel added.
“Tuberculosis is on the rise in this country, as is syphilis and other sexually transmitted infections,” the internist said.
NY asylum seekers could turn into public health crisis @usatodayopinion The health risk extends wherever the migrants are sent, including here in NYC. The porous border is not just a national security crisis, it is also a public health emergency. https://t.co/tKQd57Vdtj
— Marc Siegel MD (@DrMarcSiegel) August 17, 2023
Pinal County, Arizona, Sheriff Mark Lamb told me Siegel, “Border Patrol and local agencies have seen all types of diseases like tuberculosis, scabies, COVID, hepatitis A and B, gonorrhea, syphilis, mumps, chicken pox, dengue fever, etc.”
Further, Dr. James Hodges, an internist practicing at the Texas border, explained to Siegel that drug-resistant tuberculosis is on the rise, because migrants are only being partially treated with over-the-counter antibiotics while in Mexico.
Betsy McCaughey, former New York lieutenant governor and current chairman of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths, wrote in an April piece for the New York Post that tuberculosis, which is a bacterial infection, “is treatable with antibiotics, but it generally takes six to nine months of medication to recover. Not a walk in the park.”
The sickness spreads through the air, like the flu or a cold.
“New York City’s TB rate, at 6.1 cases per 100,000, is more than double the national rate,” McCaughey noted.
Nearly nine of the 10 cases of TB found in NYC are from people born outside the country.
Further, the Texas border counties have a TB rate three times the national average.
Another alarming development in New York was when a Rockland County man became paralyzed after contracting polio in the summer of 2022. He was not vaccinated against the disease.
The last known case of polio in the Empire States had been in 1990.
A polio vaccine developed in the early 1950s all but eradicated the disease in the U.S.
Prior to the vaccine, many thousands of Americans had contracted polio and become paralyzed, the most prominent being President Franklin Roosevelt.
New York City Health Commissioner Ashwin Vasan warned that only 50 percent of migrants entering into the city have been vaccinated against polio.
Of those who have been vaccinated, many received the less safe oral version over the one used in the U.S., which is injected.
The oral vaccine contains a live virus and is sometimes shed in the vaccinated person’s feces, which is then spread through unclean hands.
Siegel closed his piece by reiterating, “The porous border is not just a national security crisis, it is also a public health emergency.”
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