Parts of London have higher TB rates than Iraq or Rwanda per BBC News

The BBC report that parts of London now have a rate of tuberculosis infection higher than Rwanda or Iraq. The BBC report is keen to persuade is not to blame this on immigration:

'The rate of infection among UK-born Londoners has risen, while among the non-UK-born it has fallen - and the report said it would be wrong to assume TB was a disease of migrants.'

Of course rates are not measures of absolute numbers and that last section isn't saying what the BBC wants you to think that it is. 

The BBC want you to think that line says that it would be wrong to assume TB was a disease caused by immigration. Whereas it actually means that TB is no longer a disease just of migrants because it has spread.

I read that BBC report and was reminded of a report I read back in the early 2000s that said that mass immigration from Eastern Europe was bringing with it TB, a disease that had all but been eradicated from the UK. I seem to remember that claim being dismissed as racist at the time and the fuss went away, unlike the TB.

Take a look at this New Scientist report  from January this year. Here's a section that needs wider attention:

'Russia and Eastern Europe still have high rates of MDR TB today. Spiro says that many of the cases he sees in London, the TB capital of Europe, can be traced back to those countries. "The control over treatment regimes out there is dreadful," he says. "It's chaos." The number of MDR cases has been rising in England from 28 cases per year in 2000 to 81 cases in 2012.'

So do you believe the, so far as I am aware, independent New Scientist or the decidedly pro immigration BBC? The choice is yours.

Untreatable TB

Quite a few years ago I heard that TB had reappeared in the UK thanks to the increase in immigration from the former Soviet Union. Now I learn that the first case of the XDR-TB strain, which kills half of those infected and is extremely resistant to drugs used to fight more common forms of the infection, has been diagnosed in a Somali man in his 30s who is in isolation at a hospital in Scotland.

Guess what, The Telegraph informs us that "It is understood the patient, thought to be an asylum seeker, was screened for infectious diseases on his arrival into Britain last year. X-rays revealed TB scarring on his lungs, but the disease was not thought to be active so he was allowed to travel to Scotland... Health officials are now trying to contact his close friends and family to prevent any further outbreaks...The first case of XDR-TB was reported in March 2006, after researchers discovered an emerging global threat of highly resistant TB strains. Six months later 53 “virtually untreatable” XDR-TB cases were found in an area of South Africa with a high prevalence of HIV."


Reassuring thought isn't it that a drug resistant strain of TB is now in the UK and that we have our wonderful border controls did nothing to prevent this.