Refugees infected with multi-drug resistant tuberculosis resettled in Wisconsin

Thursday, July 07, 2016 by: J. D. Heyes
Tags: tuberculosis, Wisconsin, refugees

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(NaturalNews) It's hypocritical when the administration and vaccine authoritarians from the same party insist that everything walking upright in the United States be injected with scores of vaccines – only to allow unvaccinated people with dangerous transmittable diseases into the country willy-nilly.

And yet that is precisely what the Obama administration is currently doing.

As reported by Breitbart News, two refugees and a foreign student on a visa have been allowed into the country with multi-drug resistant (MDR) tuberculosis. As further noted in a 2014 article published in Epidemiology and Infection, an academic journal published by Cambridge University Press, the three settled in Wisconsin in 2009 and 2011 respectively. The article was written in cooperation with the physicians who treated them.

Introducing tuberculosis – especially a strain that is resistant to a number of standard medications – is a major threat to health, and is a danger to U.S. citizens. While active TB can be treated over a period of six to nine months – at a cost of about $17,000 per patient, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, MDR TB treatments are far pricier at a cost in excess of $150,000, taking between 20 months and two years.

Wisconsin taxpayers on the hook as incidences of the disease rise

Over the past few decades, new and more virulent strains of TB have been found all over the world, and are resistant to at least two of the drugs currently used in combination to treat active TB: rifampin, isoniazid, pyrazinamide and ethambutol. That is why the term "multi-drug resistant" (MDR) is used. Treatment for MDR TB starts only after patients are found to be resistant to the standard drug cocktail.

Following a diagnosis of MDR TB, several additional – and costly – "second level" medications are tossed into to the treatment mix.

Between 2005 and 2012, 20 cases of MDR TB were diagnosed in Wisconsin, and all of these patients were foreign-born, according to Wisconsin Department of Health Services. A dozen of those cases came from the among people from Laos, four came from India, one from Burma and one each from Nepal, Ethiopia and China.

As always, the burden falls to taxpayers, this time those in Wisconsin; public funds were used to cover the costs of treating all 20 foreign cases of MDR TB and, at a cost of about $150,000 per patient, that amounts to around $3 million that was not for state infrastructure like roads, bridges, schools and law enforcement.

"Over 70,000 refugees and former refugees live in Wisconsin. Of this number, the great majority (about 55,000) are ... from Laos in Southeast Asia, but refugees have come to Wisconsin from all over the world ... The newest come from Somalia, former Burma (Karen and Chin) and Bhutan (next to Nepal, China and India)," the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families reported.

The number of TB cases is only rising

Fourteen other states have withdrawn from the federal refugee resettlement program, but Wisconsin has not yet done so.

Globally, the number of MDR TB cases has risen from about 273,000 new cases in 2000 to nearly double that, at 480,000 new cases in 2014, according to the Obama administration.

In 2014 some 1.5 million people, or 17 percent of all new TB cases that year, died of the disease. Of those, 190,000 died of the harder to treat MDR TB, which was 39 percent of total new cases. In the U.S. alone, of 9,421 new cases, 550 people died from the disease. It should be noted that, according to the CDC, the number of active TB cases increased in 2015 by 1.7 percent, to 9,563.

Clearly the disease, which was once controlled, is on the rise again in the U.S., making the need for immune-bolstering superfoods greater now than ever before.

Sources:

Breitbart.com

WhiteHouse.gov^[PDF]

ManitowocHealthDept.info^[PDF]

NCBI.NLM.NIH.gov

CDC.gov