NY Times: "When Demagogues Play The Leprosy Card, Watch Out."

[muntrv]

Editorial Observer
When Demagogues Play the Leprosy Card, Watch Out
By LAWRENCE DOWNES
Published: June 17, 2007

People who want to reform immigration by putting America in lockdown have not been shy about using fear and revulsion to get their point across. Illegal immigrants, they say, are invading the country to reconquer it, to erode our Anglo-Saxon culture and to make us all sick.

Here’s Representative Tom Tancredo, complaining in the Republican presidential debate about pressing 1 for English. (Aliens — they’re in your telephone!) And there’s Lou Dobbs on CNN, helping racist tract-writers to peddle made-up statistics about immigrants and leprosy. (Did the country suddenly have 7,000 cases in three years? No, only a few hundred. But it sure sounds scarier.)

I know at least one person who finds the fear-mongering particularly offensive. She is Nicole Holmes, an American citizen who is a threat to nobody. She is an immigrant, and she has had leprosy.

Ms. Holmes, a cheerful 28-year-old, was born in Trinidad, grew up in Brooklyn and now lives outside Atlanta with her husband, Zakee, and two sons, Aaron, 3, and Andrew, 2. She told me her story by phone recently while her boys ran around the house, tormenting each other. (“Andrew, stop the biting, please,” she said. “Just share the car.”)

Ms. Holmes learned she had leprosy, or Hansen’s disease, when she was 18 and a student at Pace University. Her husband, then in the military, stood by her, taking her to doctor’s appointments and helping her through a difficult treatment complicated by lapses in medical insurance and frequent moves.

She is now fully recovered. She has no signs of the disease except for some scars on her arms where doctors took tissue samples for biopsies. She runs an Internet support group for leprosy patients and doctors, and is a board member of the International Association for Integration, Dignity and Economic Advancement, or IDEA, an organization that works to erase the stigma of leprosy, which it calls “one of the most persistent and pervasive forms of social injustice that society has forced upon its fellow human beings.”

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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/17/opinion/17sun4.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

[BleedingHeartPatriot]

1. I saw the early stages of Hansen's disease on the leg of a gentleman from Nigeria.

It is unique in appearance. It is also a disease with low communicability and is easily treatable.

As a nurse, I've been exposed to several other diseases which had a much higher level of communicability coupled with difficulty in treating.

I'm grateful to see Dobbs's BS debunked. MKJ