Diseases are on the rise in Maine, but the causes aren’t outside our borders

Gov. Paul LePage again has blamed a rise in several infectious diseases on immigrants to Maine, especially those seeking asylum. There is no evidence to back up this claim, just as there wasn’t when he said the same thing last year.

At one of his town hall meetings in Augusta last week, the governor said immigrants were to blame for an increase in tuberculosis, HIV and hepatitis in part of Maine. He made the same baseless point during his State of the State speech in 2015 and in the run-up to his re-election in 2014, when he blamed “illegals.”

Here’s what we do know: Cases of HIV and hepatitis are on the rise in Maine, and new cases of tuberculosis range between nine and 19 per year over the last decade but have dropped for the last three years.

According to the most recent detailed data from the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention, there were 58 new cases of HIV in Maine in 2014. That is the highest number of new cases of the disease since 2010. These data, along with the data on the CDC website about other infectious diseases, are not broken down by where the infected people were born.

New cases of hepatitis C, both acute and chronic, have increased substantially. In 2014, there were 1,425 new cases of chronic hepatitis C in Maine, up from 1,142 in 2010. There were 31 new cases of acute hepatitis in 2014 compared with none in 2005. Data for the first four months of 2016 show the upward trend continuing.

Injecting illicit drugs is a major risk factor for hepatitis C infections. Maine, of course, is in the midst of a devastating heroin epidemic. According to a Dartmouth Medical School paper, “within only six months to a year after beginning intravenous drug use, 50 to 80 percent of drug users test positive for the hepatitis C antibody.”

Indeed, intravenous drug users account for 50 percent of all new cases of the disease, the paper said.

One way to reduce hepatitis infections among drug users is to support needle-exchange programs to ensure they have access to clean needles. This should be coupled with treatment — medication-assisted treatment is the most effective — to work to end the user’s drug abuse.

LePage, however, vetoed a bill that directed the CDC to fund needle-exchange programs because the $75,000 in funding was removed from the legislation. Lawmakers overrode the veto, but they haven’t restored the funding.

The truly alarming increase is in pertussis, also known as whooping cough, which can be life-threatening to infants. Cases of pertussis have increased fivefold in the last decade. There is a vaccine available for this disease, but too few parents get their children immunized.

After ranking fourth in the country for the percentage of vaccine opt-outs in the country, Maine reversed the trend during the 2014-2015 school year. The percentage of kindergarten-age children in Maine who did not receive all the required vaccinations because their parents objected dropped from 5.5 percent in 2013-2014 to 4.4 percent in 2014-2015. That rate, however, is still among the highest in the country and well above the national average of 1.7 percent.

Tick-borne illnesses, including Lyme disease, also are increasing rapidly. Cases of anaplasmosis have increased nearly 40-fold since 2005.

There is a lot to be alarmed about in the CDC infectious disease reports, and the governor is right to be concerned about rising infection rates. But falsely placing the blame on those seeking asylum in the U.S. won’t solve the problem. It serves only to alienate those whom Maine should instead be welcoming.