NEW COLUMN IS “Will CDC Trace Polio-Like Outbreak, Or Just Shout ‘Racism’?” It’s currently on WND, The Unz Review, Townhall.com and American Greatness. An excerpt:
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) used to trace outbreaks to Patient Zero, the index case—the first patient to get, then transmit, a disease. Is this government agency doing due diligence in the cases of the polio-like paralysis infecting hundreds of America’s kids?
By the dictionary’s telling, epidemiology is “the branch of medicine that deals with the study of the causes, distribution, and control of disease in populations.”
By WND’s telling, “the diagnosis of the first cases of AFM, acute flaccid myelitis, in 2014,” coincided with the dispersal of thousands of Central American children among U.S. school children. More conspicuous at that time “was an outbreak of a deadly respiratory illness” that put hundreds of America’s children in intensive care. “Both types of symptoms can probably be caused by enterovirus D68, which happens to be endemic in Central America,” opines Dr. Jane Orient.
Are the state’s epidemiologists—whose job it is to trace and terminate outbreaks of contagious diseases—following these connections?
An outbreak necessitates the tracing of “Patient Zero,” the “single individual who bears the unknowing responsibility for having introduced the disease” to a certain population.
The same taxpayer-funded medical sleuths impressively tracked down the index case in the AIDS epidemic in North America. As documented in the late Randy Shilts’ And the Band Played On, he was Gaetan Dugas, a dashing, promiscuous, Canadian flight attendant, who had had approximately 1,000 sexual partners.
Although the CDC has provided a perfunctory status-update of its AFM Investigation, the agency’s mention of a possible genetic etiology for Poliomyelitis, a dreadful, highly infectious viral disease, is bizarre. It reads like a cop-out.
What next? Like the legendary Lancet has done, can we expect the CDC to diagnose “right-wing politics” with folly and fervency for daring to correlate “migration to infection”?
Lest you worried that “the nation’s health protection agency” was putting America First, the CDC boasts of making strides, between January 2017 and September 2018, “Toward Poliomyelitis Eradication”—in Pakistan. (I guess CDC could argue that lots of Pakistanis will end up in the U.S., “looking for a better life.”)
In any event, along for the ride with the thousands of migrants poised to pour into the U.S. from Central America is a healthy array of microbes: measles, Chagas disease, hepatitis and much more. Diversity, baby.
According to Tijuana’s Health Department, via Fox News, 60 percent of the migrants currently encamped on the U.S. border carry respiratory infections. There are, moreover, confirmed cases of tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, chickenpox, and skin infections galore, in addition to lice—these “serve as vectors of diseases like typhus.” …
… READ THE REST. NEW COLUMN, “Will CDC Trace Polio-Like Outbreak, Or Just Shout ‘Racism’?,” is currently on WND, The Unz Review, Townhall.com and American Greatness.
UPDATED (1/5/019):
Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen: “These aren’t my facts, these are the facts.”
