Re: Brenda Walker’s blog item Public Health Crisis in San Diego: 40 Dumped Aliens Are Quarantined, 10 Hospitalized with Mystery Illnesses

From: An Anonymous Bilingual Reader [Send her mail]

Back on the 22nd of June I saw an article in the online newspaper El Pais from Spain that talked about a disease that was reaching epidemic proportions in El Salvador. The disease was called "chikungunya", also known as the feared "pain virus". [Wikipedia | CDC]

According to the article the disease originates in Africa but most recently had spread to the Caribbean area and was now in El Salvador. It was detected in the Caribbean in December 2013 when they found two people with the disease and now there are more than 5,200 confirmed cases with 21 people dead and 183,000 suspected cases.

La amenaza de una epidemia desata la alerta sanitaria en Centroamérica

The threat of an epidemic causes a health alert in Central American

El temido virus del chikungunya llega a El Salvador, Venezuela y Panamá, tras dejar 21 muertos y miles de afectados en el Caribe

The dreaded chikungunya virus (fever, pain) makes the leap to the mainland through El Salvador after leaving 21 dead and thousands affected in the Caribbean.

Las autoridades sanitarias, apoyadas por la OMS, toman medidas preventivas para frenar la propagación

Sanitary authorities, supported by WHO, take preventive measures to stop the spread.

By Jan Martínez Ahrens, reporting from México, El Pais, June 22, 2014 [Google Translate English versions added by VDARE.com]

In El Salvador they have already identified 1,200 cases. It is a fever transmitted by mosquitoes, that is rarely fatal, however it does cause strong pain in the joints and muscles and in some cases it can last months and even years. Could some of the illegal aliens in San Diego that are quarantined have this disease?

James Fulford writes: They could, and I’m not sure what America’s own “sanitary authorities” will be able to do about it. Latin American countries have lousy public health, but reasonably strong public health authorities, people with the powers needed to see that sick people don’t spread their diseases.

The US, on the other hand, has terrific health and great hospitals, but tends to treat having an infectious disease like a civil right. During an epidemic of swine flu in Mexico (and the American Southwest) lawyers were telling innkeepers not to “discriminate” against people arriving from Mexico, since it could be considered “discrimination based on national origin” and Walter Olson of Overlawyered.com pointed out that “having swine flu may itself count as a protected disability under laws like California”. Here’s something else I said at the time:

On Marginal Revolution Tyler Cowen, the economist, says that  “Even a completed fence would not stop a virus…” In fact, diseases require vectors–the viruses are not hiking through the Sonoran Desert, wearing little tiny backpacks, carrying little tiny waterbottles, and singing   Mexicanos, al grito de guerra in little tiny voices that you can't hear because they're only  200 nanometers tall.

The viruses come in with people, and an unguarded border that lets millions enter without inspection every year isn't helping.