Via The Guardian: Illegals and gangsters and Ebola, oh my! 5 conservative immigration myths of the moment, made sane. I've seen one or two right-wing websites making the Ebola charge, but didn't want to waste your time with them. But this deserves some attention. Excerpt:
Theory No2: Undocumented migrants are bringing Ebola and measles to America
The source: Three weeks ago, one local news story out of South Texas led to a Drudge- and Fox News-fueled pile-on: chicken pox, TB, even swine flu. Then, "outbreak" – and now ...
The ensuing hysterics:
"Reports of illegal migrants carrying deadly diseases such as swine flu, dengue fever, Ebola virus and tuberculosis are particularly concerning. Many of the children who are coming across the border also lack basic vaccinations such as those to prevent chicken pox or measles. This makes those Americans that are not vaccinated – and especially young children and the elderly – particularly susceptible." —Rep Phil Gingrey (R - Georgia), in a letter to the director of the Centers for Disease Control
The reality:
EBOLA: Ebola is a frightful virus, to be sure – an easy shorthand for a terrifying, exotic threat. It manifests as "a severe, often fatal disease", marked by fever, diarrhea, and, in some cases, bleeding. We don't know much about where Ebola comes from (there is no identified reservoir) and have only scratched the surface on how it spreads (human-to-human by direct contact or via infected objects, after a hypothesized first contact with an infected animal).
But we do know this much: Ebola has never been reported in Latin America. Repeat: never. Not even in cases of laboratory contamination, which have resulted in human infection in Russia and England, and animal infection in the US. All naturally-occurring cases of "human illness or death [due to Ebola] have occurred in Africa," according to the CDC.
The largest Ebola outbreak on record is currently ravaging the west African nations of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, which may be why the disease has entered the popular imagination of US politicians looking for anti-immigrant scare tactics.
As for measles, the article goes on to show that most of the undocumented kids are from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador—which all have better vaccination rates than the US.
As we've seen in recent weeks with chikungunya and MERS, the real foreign health hazards for the US are its own passport-bearing citizens and visitors arriving legally from places like the Dominican Republic and Saudi Arabia. But good luck finding anti-immigration protesters outside Miami International Airport.
Schiller's words should be carved on the protesters' gravestones: "Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens"—Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain.
