Number of Tuberculosis Cases Rises in the UK Due to Immigration

"The increase in the rate of TB in the UK, which contrasts with most other European countries, may, at least in part, be due to the fact that a high proportion of UK cases occur in the foreign-born, coupled with a comparatively large number of foreign nationals from countries with a very high incidence of TB."

Who wrote that? One of the far-right "nazi grouplets", as the Marxist site Searchlight would call them? A racist, a xenophobe?

No, it is the conclusion of a scientific study published in the world's most authoritative database of peer-reviewed medical research, the US National Library of Medicine of the National Institutes of Health.

The study in question is called "The impact of immigration on tuberculosis rates in the United Kingdom compared with other European countries", and these are its results:

TB notification rates increased in only three of the 21 countries [under investigation]: the United Kingdom, Norway and Sweden. In all three countries, approximately three quarters of cases were foreign-born. The UK had the third highest number of foreign nationals overall, but the highest number from a country with a TB incidence > or =250 cases/100000 (219000, 13%). European countries with declining TB rates had varying patterns of migration, but did not generally receive migrants from very high-incidence countries and/or had a smaller proportion of their total TB cases in their migrant population.

This was published in May 2009, but the trend, far from stopping or decreasing, has continued.

Another highly prestigious, historical medical publication, The Lancet, in 2010 printed a paper entitled "The white plague returns to London—with a vengeance" calling London "the tuberculosis capital of Europe", a claim repeated last week in another paper in the same major medical journal, titled "The ongoing problem of tuberculosis in the UK":

London has the highest overall rate of tuberculosis of any capital city in western Europe. Rates of multidrug-resistant (MDR) tuberculosis have doubled in the UK over the past decade, and, although most developed countries have achieved sustained reductions in the number of cases, rates in the UK continue to rise.

The paper is a comment on a new report from the UK's All-Party Parliamentary Group on Global Tuberculosis, Drug-resistant tuberculosis: old disease—new threat, published 15 April. Among other things, the report says:

TB is the leading killer of people living with HIV/AIDS, accounting for one in four AIDS related deaths...

In the UK, TB is a particular problem among people born abroad and hard to reach groups... [In the UK] The majority of the 81 new cases in 2011 (95%) were born in South Asia, Eastern Europe and sub-Saharan Africa, with an additional six of these being the most extreme form of the disease (XDR).

There are almost 9,000 new cases of this deadly disease each year in the UK.

Tuberculosis, especially drug-resistant, cases are on the rise in the world, and "the worldwide number of new cases (more than 9 million) is higher than at any other time in history" largely thanks to the spread of HIV: "Due to the devastating effect of HIV on susceptibility to tuberculosis".

This explains why, for example, South Africa has both the world's highest burden of HIV and the third highest burden of TB. Another country which has among the highest rates in the world of both TB and HIV and has a high rate of TB/HIV co-infection is Nigeria.

The resurgence of tuberculosis, which was once one of the world’s biggest killers, has led the World Health Organisation to declare it a global health emergency in 1993.

Two of the great idol totems of our time, unrestricted mass immigration from Third World countries to Europe and normalization of homosexuality, untouchable dogmas of progressivism and liberal rectitude, are thus taking us back to the 19th century.