Dengue Fever? Told You So!
07/24/2010
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One of the predictions in Alien Nation, 1995, was that disease would become a problem with mass immigration from Third World countries:

  • Cholera, malaria, dengue fever (what?–it's like yellow fever): all are widespread in Latin America, and all have been reported in the United States recently. Quite possibly, disease incubated in the teeming human petri dishes that Third World cities now comprise may be the chance factor that finally crystallizes immigration as a political issue in the United States. For example, the U.S. Institute of Medicine has recently predicted "with some confidence" that if yellow fever, the incurable mosquito-borne disease now resurgent in Africa and Amazonia, returns to New Orleans, public health defenses could be quickly overwhelmed: "100,000 people would become ill . . . and 10,000 would likely die within 90 days .. .[Chapter 9, Immigration Has Consequences: Cultural, Social, Environmental... ]

Well, New Orleans turned out to have other problems. But today Dengue Fever is in the US news reports here and here—a representative story is Dengue Fever? What About It, Key West Says, By Denise Grady And Catharine Skipp, New York Times, July 23, 2010.

A fascinating point is that while you can get the disease in Florida and elsewhere by being bitten by a true-blue native American mosquito, the mosquito itself may have gotten the disease from an immigrant:

"Dr. Harold Margolis, chief of the disease centers’ dengue branch in Puerto Rico, said it was statistically valid to extrapolate from the 240 people tested.
”Somehow the virus is getting there,” Dr. Margolis said.
An infected visitor may have passed the virus to local mosquitoes, or a mosquito carrying dengue may have arrived on an airplane or cruise ship. Key West has plenty of Aedes aegypti, a type of mosquito that can carry dengue. "

While the people in Key West, who make their money off tourists, are saying "What About It", like the Mayor in Jaws who didn't want to worry people with wild stories about sharks, we at VDARE.com are saying "Told You So!"

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