No Relationship Between Notifiable Diseases and Immigrant Populations

Alex Nowrasteh andAndrew C. ForresterThe international spread of the SARS ‐​CoV‐​2 virus that causes the disease COVID-19 has prompted many governments to close their borders. Immigration policy plays an important role in limiting the international spread of contagious diseases.Prior to the COVID-19 crisis,several commentators were concerned that immigrants – especially illegal immigrants – were spreading serious diseases in the United States. This blog post is the first in a series to answer the question of whether immigrants spread serious notifiable diseases other than COVID-19 in the United States. This post focuses on all pooled notifiable d iseases for which there are vaccination requirements to enter the United States.MethodsThis post tests the correlation between the incidence ofnotifiable diseases and immigrant population shares on the state level for the 2010 –2018 period. We use annual, state‐​level data on notifiable disease cases from the CDC’sNational Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System (NNDSS), which reports the number of nationally notifiable infectious diseases and conditions by state and year. A  notifiable disease is one where the CDCstates that “regular, frequent, and timely information regarding individual cases is considered necessary for the prevention and control of the disease.”Numerous diseases are reported to the CDC, but this post focuses on diseases that theU.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and CDC r...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs