Monday, December 28, 2009

Potential new pandemic reaches America

From Eyewitness News/AP:

It started with a cough, an autumn hack that refused to go away.

Then came the fevers. They bathed and chilled the skinny frame of Oswaldo Juarez, a 19-year-old Peruvian visiting to study English. His lungs clattered, his chest tightened and he ached with every gasp. During a wheezing fit at 4 a.m., Juarez felt a warm knot rise from his throat. He ran to the bathroom sink and spewed a mouthful of blood.

Doctors say Juarez's incessant hack was a sign of what they have both dreaded and expected for years - this country's first case of a contagious, aggressive, especially drug-resistant form of tuberculosis. The Associated Press learned of his case, which until now has not been made public, as part of a six-month look at the soaring global challenge of drug resistance.


Let's see where we stand on this:

- Hospitals closing
- People living in overcrowded conditions
- Unchecked hordes of people entering the country
- No action plan to turn to when faced with inevitable pandemic (see "swine flu crisis")
- A government that is too concerned with ensuring an illegal labor force, a war on fat and developers' bottom lines to care about any of the above

The perfect storm.

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well...we have bike lanes. Be positive and get on your bike and ride over to your unregulated taco truck for some tasty eats!

You ain't in Davenport any more sonny.

Anonymous said...

You are all racist Archie Bunker xenophobes. Don't you know that a new multicultural restaurant opened in Astoria? We should be discussing how wonderful that is for our our VIBRANT! DIVERSE! community. And please don't bother the politicians with this new pandemic nonsense. They are busy debating important matters like gay marriage.

Anonymous said...

Shut down the borders (Or at least put hand sanitizers near the fences)

cough it up said...

Whew..slipping on a freshly spewed slippery "clam" on a Flushing sidewalk almost caused me to twist my ankle.

I never though it might be infected with "TB".

I was told that is the custom in China...to spit whatever is in your mouth...onto the sidewalks.

The government has got a real problem with it there.

Anonymous said...

what is your problem, people? everyone is from somewhere else! you are all really immigrants. no real Americans.

it is Chinese and Asian culture to sit on subway train with large large newspaper and pick your nose right out in the open. with your fingers, don't be embarrassed. even if other cultures think you are spreading germs and illness.

the wonderful mosaic as it was called by Dinkins.

Anonymous said...

Let's bring back and reinforce the No Spitting Law. The reason it was put on the books was to stop the spread of TB

Anonymous said...

TB resistant strains of bacteria are old news and have been for the last 20 years. I remember the first time, during the 1980s that I was warned that TB had re-surfaced in Astoria.

Everything old is new again. Don't forget to be screened for this, especially if you work with children or in healthcare.

Anonymous said...

This is what happens when you let everyone into our country and turn a blind eye to it. There is no health screening and the politicians don't care if disease is spread to American citizens. It's time to start deportation procedures for all illegals. Impose a five-year moritorium on immigration. We need to set-up a new system where we weed out the illegals and screen the people who really want to come here, assimilate and contribute to our country.

Anonymous said...

Well...we have bike lanes. Be positive and get on your bike and ride over to your unregulated taco truck for some tasty eats!

Why don't you do all of us a favor and take your bike and pedal east for a couple of thousand miles. Thanks and godspeed.

NOW!

Anonymous said...

Stay out of Wal-Mart and 99 cent stores !!!!
A 1/2 of these illegals are sick or have cronic worm like things living inside them.
We have no immuniety to it.

Anonymous said...

Shut down the borders ?
Have the Army sweep up and ship these cockroaches home then nuke the borders so nothing can cross for the next 5000 years.

Will be plenty of jobs and placed to live then. These 30 million cave people are gonna have 6- kids each who are going to be useless pregnant sacks and gang bangers by age 14

Anonymous said...

Let's bring back and reinforce the No Spitting Law. The reason it was put on the books was to stop the spread of TB
----------------------------------
No spitting laws? Christ, you people complain when the cops enforce the laws against putting your feet on subway seats. Imagine the hell you would give them if they wrote you for spitting!

Queens Crapper said...

No, they complained that the people didn't even have their feet on the seats yet they got tickets.

Jerry Rotondi said...

Hang that sign on city hall. Every time I leave that building I feel like I have to be disinfected.