LEPROSY, HEPATITIS AND TUBERCULOSIS RISING FAST IN UNITED STATES
Frosty Wooldridge

Frosty Wooldridge
May 31, 2007
In the past 40 years, the United States registered a total of 900 cases of the feared Biblical disease--leprosy. Virtually unknown to Americans in the last century, leprosy exceeded 7,000 new cases brought in on the backs of newcomers since 2001. Most of the people infected in America are illegal alien migrants from leprosy hot spots in Brazil, the Caribbean and India.

“And those are the ones we know about," Dr. William Levis, attending physician at Bellevue Hospital's Hansen's Disease Clinic. "There are probably many, many more."

Now known as Hansen's disease, leprosy arrives with immigrants from crowded, poor countries with scant sanitation. However, its new presence in America has caused 11 clinics to sprout up overnight. In the past six years, Levis and his staff have proved that many patients have contracted the disease without leaving the country. A 73 year old man from Queens, New York and another from Westchester County, contracted leprosy without leaving the America. As a result, the disease is now officially endemic to the Northeastern United States for the first time, ever.

Leprosy's symptoms show in bumpy rashes, skin indentations and loss of feeling in hands and feet. They're usually misdiagnosed because the disease was unheard of in the U.S. until recently. One man who immigrated from Guyana, 47, spent years looking for a doctor to cure him from the red and white splotches on his face and body. When he arrived at the clinic, no one had guessed his condition, which resulted in the loss of one toe and some of the other.

Because illegal and legal immigrants are hired into food service, dish washing, cooking, hotels and day care--leprosy finds speedy access across the country.

Another bug riding in the bodies of newcomers to America is tuberculosis. In a recent article in the Mother Jones News, Dr. Kevin Patterson, in “THE PATIENT PREDATOR,â€