Jill Stanek writes a column at WorldNetDaily yesterday entitled, Under Obama, STD Super Strains All the Rage. It’s a must read.
The money line from the article: “Political correctness and liberal ideology both cause and aggravate the spread of communicable and sexually transmitted diseases.”
Jill is right. Read her article before proceeding here.
Liberals don’t ‘get it’ when it comes to the prevention of spreading infectious diseases. That’s because, for them, ideology trumps all. Yesterday, I ran the third in a series of articles on the condom controversy, showing the data that indicate pretty conclusively the conclusion that condoms don’t work. But liberals are wed to the sexual revolution, because that’s where their roots are: in the communist and eugenic revolutions of the 20th Century, a point I hope is being underscored by my ongoing expose on Margaret Sanger.
The sexual revolution is key in redefining marriage and family; selling out 2,000 years of Christian Civilization for an orgasm, most not very good ones at that.
But what of this multi-drug resistant TB (MDRTB). While the facts cited by Jill about TB hitching a ride with HIV, the ugly truth is that New York City is ground zero for MDRTB. It’s an interesting story.
Following the national scandal uncovered by young investigative journalist Geraldo Rivera at the Willowbrook State School for the Mentally Retarded in the early 1970’s, the national landscape with regard to the mentally ill began to change. Willowbrook was a residential facility built for 4,000 but housed 6,000 and was called a “snake pit” by Senator Robert Kennedy. The cruelty and depredations there beggared the imagination. See some of the report here. The closure of Willowbrook heralded the age of group homes and day treatment facilities. This was a powerful and positive step forward. Soon, attention focussed on the mental hospitals, teeming with residents.
New York State Governor Hugh Carey facilitated the virtual emptying of the mental hospitals, returning the patients to the community. In cash-strapped New York City, struggling back from the brink of bankruptcy in 1976, and caught in the economic meltdown of the Carter Presidency, there was simply not enough money for adequate police and fire protective services, much less appropriate monitoring of the mentally ill now in the community. Many began to fall through the cracks, and homelessness began growing. Also, one of the programs to suffer was the TB monitoring program. Then, in 1986-1990 the crack cocaine epidemic hit with a vengeance. People lost their jobs and apartments. Overnight, the city was deluged with the newly homeless. Scrambling for a solution, the city opened its vast National Guard Armories, whose parade floors housed thousands of homeless people each on cots eighteen inches apart. TB-infected crack addicts stopped their year-long antibiotic treatment mid-way, creating through natural selection, resistant strains of TB.
To make matters worse, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the organism that causes TB is an airborne pathogen, which spread like wildfire among a homeless population whose immune systems were compromised from drug addiction, malnutrition, and increasingly, HIV acquired through prostitution engaged in to get money for more crack.
It was a combination of good intentions and their unintended consequences, coupled with the financial consequences of liberal elitist profligate spending, and a political establishment that refused to heed the warnings about condom inefficiency and over-reliance that I linked in this post.
The perfect storm.
The result was that New York City became the worlds leading exporter of MDRTB. That, coupled with Planned Parenthood’s relentless advocacy of condom use, with their 15% failure rate, rather than advocating sexual continence in the face of three diseases that travel together in weakened hosts, has led us to this Armageddon.
Cardinal O’Connor was right. Good morality is good medicine.
Coming Home 
Jill Stanek has an ax to grind. Dumping on the current president responsibility for long-term trends which began under Richard Nixon, and accelerated under Ronald Reagan, is ludicrous. Further, the “takeover” of the health care system is mostly focused on financing and coverage, not on how diseases will be treated. The primary exception is that a bloc of swing votes in congress insists that the government, not the patient, will decide whether an insurance policy covers abortion or not.
(I don’t really have a problem with that provision regarding abortion — I generally believe we need to come to terms with the fact that SOMEONE is going to end up paying for all the health care provided — the money doesn’t come out of a magic hat as a free gift. I don’t have any problem with employers paying — on the whole, employers don’t pay employees nearly enough for what they do, nor make proper allowances for parents to respond to the needs of children. But employers, premiums, taxpayers, underpaid hospitals and doctors, someone is going to pay for it all, somehow, so if people have to pay for their own abortions directly, rather than via premiums, economically, its a step in the direction of coming to terms with reality.)
Somewhere between the old Connecticut law that married couples could be imprisoned for using contraception, and the myth that good sex is free, there is a sensible and rational balance point. We need to find it. As with many other issues on which I do not believe the government should come down heavily with police powers, contraception should be available — but with loud and repeated admonition that quick sex is not all its cracked up to be, and it can kill you. Perhaps we even need to let people suffer with the results — there are natural consequences, after all.
There are a few patterns I believe justify harsh use of police powers. One is, anyone with a communicable drug-resistant disease should be kept in custody, not in a prison, but in a secured treatment facility, until such time as they are in condition to be released without endangering the population. Its not fair, but too bad. Life isn’t always fair, and giving ten other people a communicable drug-resistant deadly disease isn’t fair either. There is ample judicial precedent for this use of police power. Of course we have to be prepared to pay for facilities that are both humane and secure. Ditto for people who drive on a revoked license. Don’t put them in prison with homicidal maniacs and rapists and thieves and drug dealers. But put them in a secured facility where they will have a van to drive them to work. People who drive on a revoked license are a serious danger of killing some innocent carful coming the other way some dark night. They had their chance to stay off the road and remain free.
I agree that Stankek as an Obama-axe to grind. She’s bringing him into things that have nothing to do with him…like a new IL STATE law. If she wants to blame things on liberal ideology that’s one thing, but she can’t resist bringing Obama’s name into everything.
And I’m not sure that allowing HIV-infected foreigners is as terrible as she makes it out, especially if said individuals can get better treatment here than in their homeland. It’s not like we track every HIV person in the U.S., yet foreigners should be treated like terrorists for having an STD?
I’ve really liked your discussions about the effectiveness of condoms…a lot of it reminded me of the book “You’re teaching my child what??” by Miriam Grossman.
Barbara,
Thanks for your kind words. I’m not quite done with the condoms yet. If you get a chance, read Brian Clowes book that I linked to. I think you’ll find it worthwhile.
About bringing people with diseases into the country; the concern is that we swell the reservoir of pathogen within our borders. Considering that HIV brings with it TB and malaria in the same host from many countries is a serious problem.
Many of my colleagues who’ve worked in Africa report that one may purchase antibiotics without a prescription in supermarkets, often people choosing what they want by the color of the pill. This has contributed to the rise in MDRTB and XXTB. To be certain, it’s a nightmare.
SJ,
The funding issue for healthcare is the single-greatest determinative factor in decisions concerning treatment modalities, no?
The problem is that many immigrants arrive, seemingly free of disease, with fake negative TB xrays and tests, only to be discovered later to be quite sick.
Some of these pathogens then are spread unknowingly to others (but of course, quite knowingly by the sick immigrant).
I too feel that we should help people get treated but not under false pretences.
Funding doesn’t have to be the determinant of treatment. If I could design the system any way I wanted, it would be a single payer-multiple provider system. Delivery would not be a government monopoly, although payment would, with many interesting innovations we don’t have room for here. My objection is that an alleged error in public health policy regarding specific diseases by a government agency does not say much at all about whether we need a federal health care reform bill. The gratuitous “and these people think they can…” question is worthy of a long string of negative adjectives. Incidentally, I have some experience with how big bad private sector insurance bureaucracies deal with health care, and government couldn’t be any worse.
I suggest that there is some room to be more careful about people entering the country with communicable disease. Our politics and culture have gone too far down the road of “we don’t discriminate.” Of course we do. We discriminate in all kinds of ways every day, and we should. The logic “people with AIDS have a disability, we must not discriminate against people with disabilities” is ludicrous.
There should not be a blanket rule “You have AIDS, you can’t come in to our country.” Testing, some prudent inquiry as to travel plans itinerary, length of stay, are in order. In some cases, refusal of entry might be appropriate. This should all be handled in a respectful, sensitive, manner, but putting public health first, not individual desire. If I had caught fire for some reason, I don’t have a “right” to run into a wooden building for shelter or to seek aid. I would hope someone would come out and throw a bucket of water on me.