The claim about the current influx of mothers and children to the US from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador which infuriates me the most is the one which says they’re bringing diseases into this country. Not true.

While some of the kids are indeed ill, they don’t have anything exotic or unexpected, said Dr. Mark Ward of Texas Children’s Hospital, who is president of the Texas Pediatric Society.

“As might be expected from children that had endured long journeys, they are tired,” Ward told NBC News. Some have common diarrheal and respiratory illnesses, he said.

[snip]

World Bank statistics indicate that some of the countries that the kids are traveling from actually have higher vaccination rates than the United States. The U.S. has a 92 percent vaccination rate for measles. Mexico vaccinates 99 percent of its children; Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras all have a 93 percent vaccination rate.

Then there’s the lie that Representative Phil Gingrey, a Republican (of course) from Georgia is spreading: that these kids will bring Ebola to our shores. Now, Gingrey is a physician. He knows damned well that Ebola comes only from Africa and spreads via physical contact and only physical contact with someone who’s got it

Ebola then spreads in the community through human-to-human transmission, with infection resulting from direct contact (through broken skin or mucous membranes) with the blood, secretions, organs or other bodily fluids of infected people,

and he should be reprimanded by his local medical association for knowingly saying otherwise. As Charlie Pierce says,

The idea that an elected official even would consider ginning up that kind of thing by appealing to the nativist ignorance of his audience is nearly beyond belief. That said elected official is a physician is an almost comical disgrace. That anyone anywhere would do it while people are dying unremarked in an authentically terrifying medical catastrophe, simply because his primary audience is made up of people who simply hate the undifferentiated brown people with whom they have to share the planet, makes Phil Gingrey an object of justified contempt.