Teen of undetermined immigration status jailed for TB
Via the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
When doctors told Francisco Santos he had tuberculosis Friday, health officials said the Gwinnett County 17-year-old refused to believe it.
Then the wiry, dark-haired youth refused to submit to any treatment. Worse, he said he was walking out of the Gwinnett Medical Center in Lawrenceville and heading back to his home country of Mexico, officials said.
“I think he was scared,” said David Will, attorney for the Gwinnett County Board of Health.
Gwinnett health officials found themselves in a bind. They had a person with a case of active, contagious tuberculosis, refusing treatment and threatening to carry the disease to a foreign country.
They also were aware of the recent incident involving Atlanta lawyer Andrew Speaker, who also has tuberculosis. After Speaker left for his wedding in Greece, a national news conference set off an international health scare.
In this case, the Gwinnett officials acted decisively: They put Santos in jail Friday evening, in a rare act of a government agency confining a sick person. Santos is the only inmate in a special medical isolation cell designed for inmates with contagious conditions. The cell, which measures about 15 feet by 20 feet, has a special ventilation system that keeps the air from reaching other inmates.
More about his, you know, irrelevant immigration status:
Santos listed his birth place as Mexico. Will said he did not know the status of Santos’ citizenship. The Gwinnett jail has two federal immigration agents who screen foreign-born inmates to determine whether to investigate their status and potentially place a hold on them for deportation.
As early as Monday, Gwinnett health officials expect to speak publicly about the extent of Santos’ disease and his treatment.
Right now, it remains unclear how long his confinement may go on. If he starts cooperating and obtaining treatment, he could be moved to a hospital and, when he is no longer contagious, sent home for further treatment. But if he continues his denials, the judge may commit him to a hospital with security for treatment, Will said.
See here for a medical journal article on the rise of TB among children in San Diego County.
And see here for a CDC paper on tuberculosis and immigrants in the US.
One more: Heather Mac Donald compares and contrasts the public health response to asbestos vs. TB.
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MM, thanx for the info.
The illegals could start a pandemic here. Anybody ever heard of the Spanish flu?
Why in the hell does it take so incredibly long to determine someone’s immigration status???? Insane!
I think that’s a fair question. Checking someone’s ID during a traffic stop takes a few minutes. My bank can tell you my entire credit history in 30 seconds. Why should it take weeks to determine something so basic as whether or not someone is here legally?
This is on of the more immediate dangers of unfettered illegal immigration. My youngest sister nearly died 5 years ago after contracting a rare viral infection that is usually found only in Central America. They traced it to a restaurant where people who hadn’t signed in at the gate were working.
XDR TB is the scariest thing you can imagine. I read the blog of an ER physician in urban Los Angeles who describes these cases, and the fact that if you should contract such a thing, you will be told that you will soon die, there is nothing that can be done, and some of your close family and friends will likely die of it soon as well. Welcome back to the 14th century!
This physician reports in her blog that doctors in Mexico are simply pinning notes onto TB patients and telling them to cross the border to get to a hospital in SD or LA. The note contains an abbreiviated medical chart. Until they are in isolation, these patients are a deadly threat to the entire population.
I won’t include a link simply because despite everything she sees, this doctor is a raging lefty, but her blog is mostly medical profession stuff and the comments section is lots of hospital/medicine/anatomy. Not much politics.
Why can they not just turn him over to health officials in Mexico when they deport him?
Such an important topic is illegal migration, you’d think the media would be reporting on how well ICE is doing in deporting illegal aliens, or if it’s pro-illegal business as usual in the Bush administration, which is likely given Bush’s babyish, pouty personality. Other than deafening silence, I don’t hear much in the mainstream lib media on the subject.
Think about that next time you go to a restaurant, go to the grocery store, sit in the emergency room, etc.
Legal immigrants must undergo health checks. In fact they have since the turn of the century, but our glorious government was proposing granting amnesty to people without even a health check.
Is every building in the U.S. and State govenrments in this country fully contaminated by stupidity?
If for no other reason, the potential for communicable deseases infecting the entire population (including bureaucrats) should be reason enough to seal the borders.
Wheter your on the left right or middle, this is a serious threat to all of us.
Oops!! Wheter s/b whether.
Here’s a PDF from the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons. I’ve just skimmed thru it and it’s not pretty.
an article here.
.
-Typhoid struck Silver Spring, Maryland,
-“Contagious diseases that are generally considered to have been controlled in the United States are readily evident along the border..”
-. The incidence of tuberculosis in El Paso County is twice that of the U.S
-U.S.-Mexico border and that dysentery is several times the U.S. rate.
and my favorite: “The pork tapeworm, which thrives in Latin America and Mexico, is showing up along the U.S. border, threatening to ravage victims with symptoms ranging from seizures to death.
The JEWISH communities were inundated by this and it confounded them…until they checked their employees hands. Illegal aliens rarely wash their hands after using the restroom and the Americans that hired the illegals got infected.
.
.
They’re ( geraldildo’s vast family) killing us in multiple ways.
We’ve opened pandora’s box. I’ve stopped or arrested multiple illegals. They either have no ID, fake ID or multiple alias’ When you run whatever name they give you in the national crime data base you are overwhelmed by the multiple names that come back. Ironically they all have similar birthdates or close phoney social security numbers. Almost as if there is some organization prompting them!!??
I’ve also had trouble reaching ICE in the past, haven’t tried it recently and they usually would not come due to lack of personnel or the crime wasn’t bad enough! The sum of it all, when you arrest someone, they could be a very dangerous criminal but without a central efficient/responsible data bank they may well slip through. Mr lettuce head could easily require a fool proof ID card with a fingerprint/photo profile for anyone here in the country who is in process for immigration. If you stop someone without one they should take a trip out of here!
It would be interesting to know how and why he came to be examined by health officials in the first place to understand how TB can be discovered. Did he go to a doctor or hospital himself for something? Did he have a physical as part of an immigrant visa application for example, or something else? We are left to wonder as the original story leaves out a good bit of detail, and really starts halfway into the story.
As others here have already observed in different ways, poverty isn’t the only thing that Mexico exports to the USA.
.
What are the chances he BROUGHT it to the U.S. from an unnamed “foreign country”?
And as we know from previous stories, “undetermined status” very often means “illegal”.
On the asbestos vs. TB front: My (very old) house has asbestos shingle siding. Can’t be purchased anymore. But it poses no (or low) threat to my health or that of my family UNLESS IT’S BROKEN UP AND CREATES DUST PARTICLES THAT ARE INHALED. In many places, the very act of “cleaning up” the asbestos turned the asbestos from something of no (or low) danger into a high danger when the solid asbestos was broken up creating asbestos dust.
The sad thing about this guy is that he illustrates perfectly the key point I teach in my CPR and First-Aid classes about disease transmission.
Its not the problem you can see physically, but the problem you cannot see microscopically that is going to kill you, and it will be a painful and excrusiating death.
Sad thing this why I gave up going to school to become a nurse or PA. 20 years of working as an Navy Corpsman nad EMT convinced me to leave while I was still healthy enough to enjoy life.
gunslinger, if was a “nad EMT” I’d quit too…
(just kidding, I do that typo too…)
You can bet there are dozens/perhaps a hundred or more infected that have been in contact with this guy. It’s impossible to have but one case of it. Strains of TB are also coming in from Asia, along with many other sordid things. There was a reason all immigrants were screened at Ellis Island.
Has anyone heard how the nutjob that went on his honeymoon to Europe contracted his TB? Don’t recall anyone releasing that information?
That sure is being kept quiet, isn’t it?
there is a company that knowingly employs illegals in San Diego, this company has had a portion of their workforce shown to have a form of TB. This company did not take steps to ensure the safety of their product to the consumer and failed to notify fellow employees of the danger until this information was leaked to the public. We need to get serious about punishing these employers. We need to get serious about the health risks. The only way is to hit them where it hurts, and that is in the proverbial pocket book.
Well it’s confession time. I used to teach primarily illegal immigrants for three years to get my student loan to go away. When I took that job I was tested for TB and it was negative. However, the following year they tested everyone again and everyone who tested negative which was every employee came back positive. I had to take the 9 months of meds and then they decided to put me on another 9 month round because they were not getting the results they wanted. I have yet to get another teaching job once they find out I have had this “problem” even though the docs assure me that I am not spreading it anywhere. No one in my immediate family has tested positive since this happened but I find that people shy away from me if they know.
This is a big problem that El Presidente Bush or all the other illegal lovers want to “discuss”.
Reine #19, all they gushed about when giving details of the guy was that his fiancee had tested negative. His father-in-law worked for the CDC, but nothing there. And, he’s a lawyer. With the privacy laws I’m suprised we were given that much.
terrig #21, what a life altering experience. Isn’t Gov. Richardson bringing in spanish speaking teachers to New Mexico now from Mexico and other points south? Wonder if they’ll be fast-tracked or suffer the mountains of paperwork/disclosure statements citizens are subjected to get a teaching credential? For that matter, the number that work in school cafeterias and as janitors – do they get screened? If they don’t I’d pitch a fit. Wish you all the best.
just last night I heard a Chicago radio show where some idiot (dem) gal from the State House of Reps went off on a guy who dared suggest that illegals were posing a health hazzard because they skip by the all important checks performed on those wishing to immigrate.
I wonder if I can find that dope’s e-mail addy, and ask her what she thought of this…
Sometimes here at this Hospital I work at, we see this type of situation. These folks come from third world countries, and our government allows open borders for cheap labor. This is one reason I have called for Chertoff, and Condi to be fired.
Guess who’s working in your Restaurants in the back kitchen? (Gee, I hope they wash their hands.)
Guess who’s picking your lettuce? (Has the USDA figured out where last year’s contamination scare originated?)
Who, essentially, handles this Nation’s food supply, for cheap wages, and pretty much completely unsupervised ???
All these “superbugs” and epidemics lying dormant for years, and all of the sudden coming out of nowhere.
I know why. I reckon the USDA knows why too. Don’t plan on hearing a thing about it from them.
More info on TB in Mexico.
Literally scary, folks.
http://www.usaid.gov/our_work/global_health/id/tuberculosis/countries/lac/mexico_profile.html