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Before demonizing undocumented children, we should look at the facts: The vast majority of Central Americans are vaccinated against all these diseases. Governments concerned about health, and good parents investing in their kids, have made Central American kids better-vaccinated than Texan kids. We fear them not because they are actually sick, but because of powerful anti-immigration narratives that link foreigners to disease.
Consider, for example, Guatemala. According to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), Guatemalan kids are more likely than Texans to be immunized for most infectious diseases. Guatemala has universal health care. Vaccines are 100 percent funded by the government.
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Fact check: UNICEF reports that 93 percent of kids in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador are vaccinated against measles. That’s better than American kids (92 percent).
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Tuberculosis (TB) is one of the diseases most calculated to frighten Texans. On the right-wing blog Breitbart Texas, Vliet claims that immigrants with TB “are putting others’ lives at risk,” and that multi-drug-resistant TB is the “most common form” of TB in Latin America.
The latter is simply false: Fewer than 1 percent of TB cases in the Americas are multi-drug-resistant, according to the WHO. Most of those cases are still treatable. According to the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS), no cases of the more difficult extensively drug-resistant TB (XDR-TB) were reported here in 2012.
More than 90 percent of Central Americans are vaccinated against TB, according to the WHO. The vaccine, called the BCG, is imperfect. It’s used in countries where TB is still common, but some cases will break through the vaccine’s coverage.
Americans are not routinely vaccinated. According to the state health department, the 1,233 cases of TB that occurred in Texas in 2012 were mostly along the border and in prisons. The disease has stayed crouched in those centers of poverty because it flourishes where people live in close quarters and suffer from diseases like alcoholism and HIV, which knock down their immune defenses. Eradicate poverty, and TB fades away.
Fear of disease is motivating people to move against immigrants. In League City, the City Council voted this week to prohibit the housing or processing of undocumented immigrants. The resolution cited the “threat of communicable diseases reported to be prevalent” among immigrants as a justification for the use of police power to protect “citizens” from these children.
And in Murrieta, California, protesters blocked buses carrying migrant children after it was revealed that some of them had been hospitalized for fevers.
Fear turns sick kids into a threat. But the threat of tuberculosis is overblown. The state health department is screening unaccompanied minors for the disease. Some small percentage of them—like a tiny percentage of Texan kids overall—probably have TB. It can be controlled and treated before it spreads.
Even if these unaccompanied minors did pose a huge tuberculosis threat—which they do not—Texas is equipped to deal with it. We have clinics, first-line antibiotics and even a tuberculosis sanitarium to house folks who can’t keep up with the daily antibiotics on their own.
There are legitimate health concerns associated with human migration. But the narrative that immigrants such as these children are particularly diseased has more to do with fear than it does with science.