[Click here to order Sam Francis' new monograph, Ethnopolitics: Immigration, Race, and the American Political Future]

Among the many benefits of the mass immigration the Open Borders Lobby has invited into the country are the diseases that would probably all but have vanished from American and Western society but for the presence of Third World immigrants.

Tuberculosis, rubella (German measles) and hepatitis are among the most serious, but last week the New York Times science section disclosed yet another Third World plague immigration has contributed to the scrutiny of medical science and public hygiene. It makes tuberculosis look rather like a summer cold. [ Rare Infection Threatens to Spread in Blood Supply by Donald G. McNeil Jr., New York Times, 17 Nov 2003]

This one is known as Chagas disease, which flourishes in Latin America and operates mainly by "threatening the United States blood supply," according to the public health officials the Times interviewed.

It is not—yet—common in the United States, but thanks to immigration it may soon be.

Indeed, only nine cases of Chagas transmitted by blood transfusions are known in the United States and Canada in the last 20 years, but perhaps you see the problem despite such encouraging news.

The problem is that as immigration from Latin America increases, and more Latin Americans donate blood, the greater the chance for the disease to enter blood supplies—whence the disease may come to you and your family.

As the Times reports,

"Because the disease is most common in rural areas from southern Mexico to northern Chile, the threat is greatest in American cities with many immigrants from those areas."

Well, it just shows how really provincial America is. In "Mexico, Central America and South America," the Times reports, "18 million people are infected, and 50,000 a year die of it." 

Moreover, the more immigrants from such places are around, the more infections there will be. In the United States as a whole, the risk of getting a transfusion of infected blood is a mere 1 in 25,000, according to scientists at the American Red Cross—pretty good odds. But in Miami, in 1998, where Latin immigrants are common, the risk is 1 in 9,000—not quite such good odds. In Los Angeles the same year, the odds are 1 in 5,400—even worse odds but not quite what they were only two years earlier: 1 in 9,850.

So what does Chagas do exactly? Well, it's transmitted by cute little insects fetchingly known as "assassin bugs," which live in the thatch in your roof.

Many Americans do not have thatch in their roofs, but the Open Borders lobby is working on that.

The assassin bug is attracted to the open mouths of sleeping humans, crawls in and sucks some blood. In exchange it gives the sleeper a microbe that the sleeper sometimes rubs into the wound. The microbe causes Chagas.

As to what the disease actually does, well, those who get it "will die when their hearts or intestines, weakened by the disease, explode." But that's only 10 to 30 percent of those who get Chagas, which is the good news.

It's hard to say what the bad news is since there's just so much of it.

First, despite the disease's rarity so far, "hundreds of blood recipients may be silently infected already."

Second, there is no way to tell yet, since the disease can lie dormant for 10 to 30 years before your internal organs start celebrating the Fourth of July. 

Third, there's no test available yet to determine whether blood supplies are infected.

The Food and Drug Administration has not approved a reliable test for the presence of the disease in blood supplies, and no such test seems to be known anyway. One researcher at a major pharmaceutical company told the Times she doesn't expect a test to be available until 2005.

The danger for Americans, of course, is not that assassin bugs will crawl into their mouths but that they'll need blood transfusions for ordinary reasons and the blood they'll get will be infected and no one will know until some day 10 to 30 years in the future you start spilling your guts—quite literally.

Of course the Open Borders lobby, which has crooned about the wonderful gifts that immigrants from the Third World are bringing us, never knew about Chagas or the problems—like mass epidemics—that the disease might cause, even though critics of mass immigration for decades have warned about its impact on public health.

It might have been helpful if the Open Borders crowd had paid some minimal attention to the realities of the Third World.

But since they refused, it would be helpful today if everyone else ceased paying attention to them at all.

As for Chagas, it may be rare today, but as the Times reports, "Experts expect it to become better known as new tests are developed."

You can bet your roof thatch.

COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

[Sam Francis [email him] is a nationally syndicated columnist. A selection of his columns, America Extinguished: Mass Immigration And The Disintegration Of American Culture, is now available from Americans For Immigration Control. Click here for Sam Francis' website. Click here to order his monograph, Ethnopolitics: Immigration, Race, and the American Political Future and here for Glynn Custred's review.]