It’s not a very romantic disease, after all

The 19th Century was rife with tuberculosis, and a lot of famous people died from it. Indeed, a whole lot of people who were not famous died from it too, with the tuberculosis death rate in Europe hovering around 30% during the 19th century. With that high level of infection, it’s not surprising that it affected many artists. The most obvious to my mind were the Bronte siblings: Emily, Anne and Branwell. (Poor Charlotte died from hyperemesis during pregnancy.) Other famous victims of tuberculosis (although sometimes ex post facto diagnosis is sketchy) were Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Lord Byron, Robert Burns, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Washington Irving, Paul Gauguin, Frédéric Chopin, and on and on. (Here’s a pretty complete list.) It got to the point where these writers and artists, by being visible symbols of the disease, helped tuberculosis take on a romantic cast, with the image of the frail, flame cheeked, coughing genius dying gracefully on the chaise longue. The reality, of course, is much uglier.

TB is back in the news now with the wandering lawyer, traveling far and wide and coughing on people as he goes. Much as he’s become a cause celebre, Michelle Malkin gets to the larger, uglier truth, which is the TB is on the rise in America because of the influx of illegal aliens. Ellis Island on the East Coast, and Angel Island on the West Coast may have provided pretty unfriendly welcomes for legal immigrants at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th Centuries, but they had one singular virtue: they screened for disease. No one is screening the fence climbers, river swimmers and desert crawlers who are making their way into America right now. This means that a whole lot of TB is crossing into our borders. A dear friend of mine, who works in a public school district that is almost majority illegal immigrant, now tests positive for TB although, thankfully, she has not taken on an active infection. The same risk of TB exposure affects other Americans in regular contact with high numbers of illegal aliens, such as meat packing workers.

TB is not romantic, it’s not a disease that lives only in history, and it’s a really, really bad thing if it takes hold here. Aside from the fact that there are rising strains of virtually untreatable TB, even the treatable versions are a problem. The medicines are expensive; they have miserable, often permanent side effects; and they have to be taken with complete regularity, or they backfire and create drug resistant TB. It kind of makes you wonder whether the 400 lb, pork-filled, complicated, unworkable immigration bill includes provisions to deal with this border problem?