More than 200 Georgia high school students were tested for tuberculosis after a student was diagnosed with the disease, the third case in the state in two weeks.
The Gwinnett County Health Department said a Discovery High School student was being treated for TB, reported WSB-TV in Atlanta on Tuesday.
Last week, two cases of tuberculosis were confirmed in Georgia’s Floyd County.
In 2014, a Georgia congressman at the time who also is a physician, Phil Gingrey, warned the CDC that minors from Central America were importing infectious diseases considered to be largely eradicated in the United States, including tuberculosis, swine flu and dengue fever.
On Tuesday, Customs and Border Protection reported a record number of families from Central America entered the United States in February.
During a surge of young illegal immigrants in 2016, the Centers for Disease Control warned staff that many would be infected with tuberculosis, but the public wasn’t given a head’s up, the Washington watchdog Judicial Watch found.
The Texas Department of State Health Services reported that as of Feb. 21, 178 detainees at Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities have been confirmed to have mumps.
In 2014, Gingrey said many of the migrants lacked basic vaccinations such as those to prevent chicken pox or measles.
In a letter to the director of CDC, he demanded that the agency keep Americans informed about its plan to handle the growing public health crisis posed by the influx of minors.
“As the unaccompanied children continue to be transported to shelters around the country on commercial airlines and other forms of transportation, I have serious concerns that the diseases carried by these children may begin to spread too rapidly to control,” he wrote. “In fact, as you undoubtedly know, some of these diseases have no known cure.”
