Texas Immigration Center a Magnet for Disease
Article subtitle:
Border Patrol union says poor medical screening risks new virus outbreak.
Article publisher:
National Review Online
Article date:
24 June 2014
Article category:
Our American Future
Medium
Article Body:
Border Patrol official says he’s concerned the medical screening at the Border Patrol Station in McAllen, Texas, has grown so porous that a new superbug will make its way into the United States through the station.
Albert Spratte, the sergeant-at-arms of the National Border Patrol Council Local 3307 in the Rio Grande Valley, says... “It’s like a crapshoot,” Spratte says. “You may or may not be letting something in with a disease we haven’t had in the U.S. before.” He says he knows of an active case of tuberculosis that passed through the facility, along with people who had scabies and others who had measles. There was even one case of leprosy, he says. “I don’t think the people in the interior U.S. realize it’s a different world,” Spratte says. “This is the U.S., but it’s a different part of the U.S. This is almost like a different country.”...
Spratte says he does not know what else Border Patrol officers could do. “We can’t solve this, we can’t stop the problem because it’s not an enforcement thing, it’s a policy,” he says. “Because whether or not it was intentional, the policies they have in Washington I believe are encouraging them (illegal immigrants).”