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Smallpox is a horrible disease that has killed more than 300 million people in the twentieth century alone and millions of others before. But it is a scourge of the past, the only human virus to have been eradicated.
By remembering this, you can appreciate the stupidity of the statement Fox News – by a former ICE agent – that the migrant caravan of 4,000 men, women and children, mainly from Central America, will bring smallpox to America.
"They come up with diseases such as smallpox, leprosy and tuberculosis that will infect our people in the United States," said former agent David Ward this week.
There is no more smallpox in circulation. This has been the case since 1980, when a major global vaccine effort erased the virus from the world. The risk of leprosy – now called Hansen's disease – imported from Latin America is just as far away. And while some foreign-born people have higher rates of tuberculosis, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) control the presence of TB in people traveling to the United States.
This particular type of xenophobic campaign of fear, which Donald Trump propagated as a presidential candidate, is resurfacing at the mid-term, in an apparent ploy to shake the conservative base.
But the bottom line is that travelers and visitors from time to time trigger outbreaks in the United States. But they tend not to be Honduran refugees, but Americans who get sick abroad, then come back to the United States and infect people in their communities who have refused the vaccines for themselves or their children.
In the United States, many outbreaks of infectious diseases are aggravated by the refusal of the vaccine
One of the largest measles outbreaks in recent US history was triggered by an American missionary who brought the Philippine virus back to his unvaccinated community in Ohio Amish. Just before that, in the first half of 2014, 97% of the 288 cases of measles in the United States had been caused by travelers who had introduced the disease into other countries, mainly the Philippines.
Another major measles epidemic among Somalis born in Minnesota became uncontrollable because anti-vaxxers fueled the fear of autism in this community and people stopped vaccinating their children. The people most affected by this epidemic were the American-Somali children.
"If the anti-vaccine movement had not been successful here, that would not have been a problem," said Peter Hotez, director of the vaccine development center at Texas Children's Hospital at Baylor College of Medicine.
People from these countries often have better vaccination coverage rates than the Americans. Brazil has 100 percent coverage for measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine, for example. El Salvador has 94% coverage, Honduras 88% and Mexico 98%. In the United States, the MMR rate is 91%.
As my colleagues at Le Verge point out, although the CDC recognizes the risk of spreading the disease by migrants in the United States, there is no evidence of significant outbreaks at the border,
The idea that leprosy is imported from Latin America from Latin America is also absurd. "We have leprosy transmission in Texas and Louisiana by armadillos," Hotez said. "We have registered in the United States about 200 registered people (leprosy patients)." Mexico has a comparable burden of leprosy – about 500 cases – while El Salvador only has six, Honduras in nine, and Nicaragua has 21. non-factor. "
That's xenophobia
So, if there is little truth in the history of disease-laden migrants, what is really behind it? The sometimes ugly human tendency to xenophobia.
For a long time, foreigners have been accused of harboring and spreading diseases. It is one of the means by which the instinctive mistrust of humans towards "other" persons manifests itself. Adam Rogers has had a large number of examples of so-called sick migrants to Wired:
People called cholera the "Irish disease" in the 1830s and tuberculosis the "Jewish disease" in the 1890s. And the 1918 flu epidemic coincided with a giant immigration wave to the United States, causing all sorts of fears about the spread of the disease. (It is fair to point out that immigrants did introduce smallpox into North America – white Europeans, starting with Christopher Columbus' crew.)
We experienced the same xenophobia during Ebola, when countries, including Canada, issued senseless license bans for people in West Africa affected by the Ebola virus. And we could see more getting up while political races heat up in the next few days. So, remember that human prejudices and lack of evidence support fear.
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