The border patrol has acknowledged that there are three confirmed cases of tuberculosis amongst illegal aliens who crossed into America through the Biden administration’s encouragement and connivance. This should worry everyone. We don’t think much about tuberculosis, except maybe as a Victorian disease, but it was once America’s greatest killer and, thanks to drug-resistant strains, can be again.

The tweet is straightforward:

BREAKING: CBP sources confirm to FOX News that there are ** three confirmed cases of Tuberculosis ** among migrants in the El Paso sector… further complicating the already daunting task of managing an overwhelming number arriving daily @FoxNews

— Griff Jenkins (@GriffJenkins) September 22, 2023

Of course, three confirmed cases are simply the teeniest tip of the iceberg. With people from the world’s undeveloped countries pouring by the millions over our southern border, you can be guaranteed that thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of them are harboring diseases that long ago vanished in America, everything from scary parasites to tuberculosis, malaria, scabies, dengue fever, leprosy, etc.

But it’s tuberculosis, especially, that should worry us. Many diseases are so bad that they burn themselves out quickly, or illness swiftly follows exposure so you can control them. Tuberculosis, though, is a very slow disease. You don’t know you have it until it’s gotten a hold on you, meaning that you’ve been contagious for a very long time. And once you’ve got it, it systematically destroys your lungs. It’s a miserable way to die because you literally cough your lungs out.

In the late 19th- and early-20th centuries, tuberculosis was America’s biggest killer. And indeed, in all those undeveloped countries around the world, the ones that are sending their people our way across the border, it’s still the world’s deadliest disease.

So, if TB is so deadly, why did it disappear in America? It went away because of the wonders of antibiotics. TB is a bacterial disease and, after WWII, we wiped it out. Or, more accurately, we mostly wiped it out. TB continued to linger in certain populations, most notably drug users and, eventually, AIDS sufferers. Many of these people were non-compliant, meaning they’d start using the antibiotics when they felt sick but then stop when they felt better.

The thing about antibiotics, though, is that you can’t just stop when the symptoms abate. Instead, you must take them for an entire cycle (usually ten days) to ensure that all the bad bacteria, not just most of them, are dead. If any are still living when you stop the antibiotics, they’ll come back like zombies, only this time, they’ll be antibiotic-resistant zombies.

If you have antibiotic-resistant TB, you’re suddenly living in the 19th- and early-20th centuries, when the only treatment was to go into a sanitorium. There, you had to lie completely still for as many hours a day as possible (preferably 24), hoping that your lungs would encapsulate the diseased tissue, rendering it harmless. I don’t know the statistics, but based on this amazing book, The Plague and I, by Betty MacDonald, who wrote the delightful Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books, the death rate in sanitoriums was around 50%. Doctors and nurses who worked in the sanitoriums also died like flies.

The fact that there are three “confirmed” cases is very bad news, especially because I don’t see illiterate, non-English-speaking illegal aliens being a compliant population about treatment. (Yes, I’m prejudiced.) This is what Joe Biden’s reckless lawlessness is bringing to America. We lived in a precious window of time during which we were insulated from diseases that once were the scourge of humankind. Thanks to Joe, though, they’re all coming back again.

Image: Internet meme; creator unknown.