WHAT A HEEL!: Mexican With Multiple Drug Resistant TB Enters U.S. Multiple Times
Once again two federal agencies charged with safeguarding the safety of the American people are at odds over how to handle border security. This time, it’s the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) sparring over what should have been done about a Mexican businessman infected with multiple-drug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB), who had a valid border-crossing card and visited El Paso, TX, 21 times in April and May. In accordance with World Health Organization recommendations to restrict international travel in such cases, DHS wanted to revoke the border-crossing card of Amado Isidro Armendariz Amaya, but the CDC's global migration and quarantine division objected on the grounds that other Mexicans infected with virulent strains of TB living close to the U.S. border would be driven underground. Amid the controversy surrounding the government’s haphazard procedures to quarantine TB-infected lawyer Andrew Speaker, Armendariz’s own physician at a Ciudad Juarez run by the TX Department of Health broke the stalemate and convinced his patient to relinquish his border card on or about May 31.
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