SHARYL ATKISSON NOW SCAREMONGERING ABOUT IMMIGRANTS AND ENTEROVIRUS-68

Sharyl Atkisson, the former CBS reporter who's become a wingnut hero for her coverage of Fast and Furious and Benghazi!!!, has now joined the crowd of right-wingers blaming the spread of Enterovirus-68 in the U.S. on undocumented immigrants:

Link to Illegal Immigrant Children?

Enteroviruses commonly circulate in the U.S. during summer and fall. EV-D68 was first identified in California in 1962. Over the past thirty years, only small numbers were reported in the U.S.

The CDC hasn't suggested reasons for the current uptick or its origin. Without that answer, some question whether the disease is being spread by the presence of tens of thousands of illegal immigrant children from Central America admitted to the U.S. in the past year.

The origin could be entirely unrelated.

Right, though Atkisson clearly believes it would be irresponsible not to speculate based on vague circumstantial evidence. See below.

... a study published in Virology Journal, found EV-D68 among some of the 3,375 young, ill people tested in eight Latin American countries, including the Central American nations of El Salvador and Nicaragua, in 2013. (See Fig. 3)

Yes, and Figure 3 says Enterovirus-68 was found in 10 of the 3,375 young people tested. That's less than half of 1% of the total sample.

Though the U.S. government is keeping secret the locations of the illegal immigrant children, there are significant numbers of them in both cities in which the current outbreak was first identified, Kansas City, Missouri and Chicago, Illinois, according to local advocates and press reports....

The EV-D68 outbreak was first recognized after Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri notified CDC on August 19 of an increase in severe respiratory illnesses. Four days later, on August 23, the University of Chicago Medicine Comer Children’s Hospital notified CDC of a similar increase.

Yes, but if you go to Atkisson's last link, which is to a CDC report on the current outbreak, you see a link to another CDC report -- from September 2011 -- titled "Clusters of Acute Respiratory Illness Associated with Human Enterovirus 68 --- Asia, Europe, and United States, 2008--2010." It turns out that there were several clusters of Enterovirus 68 in that period -- in the Philippines, the Netherlands, and Japan, as well as in three non-contiguous U.S. states: Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona. I don't know why those U.S. clusters happened, but they happened years before this summer's wave of border crossings by young Central Americans -- and the clusters overseas certainly had nothing to do with our Mexican border at all.

World Net Daily retransmits Atkisson's scaremongering -- but even WND offers some evidence that this particular outbreak might have nothing to do with the border situation:

While not proving the Enterovirus outbreak originated with the Central American children, the CDC reports on its website confirmed EV-D68 cases in 44 states and the District of Columbia since mid-August. That includes states, such as Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming, which have very few illegal minors. Meanwhile, Arizona, a common crossing point and holding ground for illegal aliens, is one of the six states that have not had a confirmed case of EV-D68.

That's true -- in fact, the CDC now lists only two states in the continental U.S. without reported cases: Arizona and Nevada. How would Arizona escape the virus this time around if the outbreak is border-related?

Atkisson is, of course, a vaccine skeptic. So take her reporting on science with massive quantities of salt.