Topic: WorldNetDaily
Jerome Corsi -- who wants us to think he's some kind of expert on Ebola, even though all he does is fearmonger about it -- plays the filthy-immigrant card in a Nov. 10 WorldNetDaily article:
The Chagas virus is a potentially lethal disease that international health authorities virtually universally agree has been brought to the United States in the flood of “unaccompanied minors” this year.
Corsi is implying that Chagas did not exist in the U.S. until this year, which is completely false. In fact, as Wired reported, Chagas was documented in New York City in the early 1980s and has been prevalent in Texas for years. Wired also warns against doing what Corsi is doing:
As I type that I can almost feel the default anti-immigrant response: “They” pose a risk to us, so if we only kept “them” on the other side of our borders, we’d be safe. The problem, of course, is that diseases and their vectors have no concept of borders — and thanks in part to climate change, there is now a competent Chagas vector on our side of the border, in Texas. A third paper, published two years ago in PLoS NTD, argues that Chagas is now endemic in Texas, traveling from Triatoma species through dogs and into people — and is going undetected because blood-donation screening is not mandatory in the state and physicians are not required to report the disease’s occurrence to health authorities.
Corsi goes on to cite Elizabeth Vliet -- a fearmongering-obsessed doctor affiliated with the fringe group Association of American Physicians and Surgeons -- blaming illegal immigrants for "bringing diseases the U.S. had controlled or virtually eradicated," including Chagas. Given the AAPS' history of falsely blaming illegal immigrants for spreading illnesses in the U.S., Vliet is simply not a credible source. Not that it will stop Corsi from citing her, of course.
(In the AAPS article by Vliet that Corsi cites, Vliet laments that "Vaccine-preventable diseases like chicken pox, measles and whooping cough spread like wildfire among unvaccinated children." She doesn't mention that the AAPS opposes mandatory vaccination of children, which probably contributes much more to the spread of such diseases.)
Corsi found another disease to blame on filthy immigrants in a Nov. 11 WND article:
Dengue hemorrhagic fever has been added to the list of diseases brought by the surge of “unaccompanied minors” who have illegally entered the U.S. this year.
“The big picture here is that we are getting all these diseases brought into the United States by the ‘imported disease people’ from Latin America,” Dr. Lee Hieb, past president of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, explained to WND in an interview.
Again, Corsi is falsely implying that there was no dengue fever in the U.S. before this year. In fact, the Centers for Disease Control reported cases in the U.S. in 2012.
Neither Corsi nor Hieb -- another factually challenged AAPS-linked fearmongerer -- present any actual evidence that the presence of dengue-spreading mosquitoes is the direct result of those filthy "unaccompanied minors," only mentions of "suspicion" and Hieb ranting about "the big picture." They don't mention that dengue fever is starting to become a problem in Key West, Florida, an area not known for problems with illegal immigration.
In short, these two articles are all about fearmongering and nothing about informing. He never proves that the unaccompanied minors have resulted in any actual increased risk of these diseases spreading in the U.S. Thus, he has failed in his fearmongering mission.
Corsi is just another reason why nobody believes WND.
