by Selwyn Duke
If your three children all got sick the day after a new kid came over to play, you’d have a decent clue about who the vector of disease was. This comes to mind with the reintroduction in California of an ancient killer: tuberculosis (TB).
The world’s deadliest infectious disease, TB caused an estimated 1.23 million deaths worldwide in 2024. In fact, approximately 10.7 million people were sickened by it that year. And the disease ranks among the top 10 overall causes of global mortality.
Of course, far from new, TB is one of man’s “oldest continuously existing diseases,” wrote commentator Andrea Widburg Friday. “Confirmed cases have been found in mummies dating as far back as 3,000 B.C.” Evidence, though, “suggests that the TB gene goes back tens of thousands of years.” Widburg adds that it was also
one of the great killers in 18th- and 19th-century Europe and America. In the early 1800s, it is estimated to have caused 25% of urban deaths in the U.S., and was probably the leading overall single cause of death in America before antibiotics. And now it’s back.
Reporting on the story, the New York Post writes:
California health officials are scrambling after tuberculosis exposures were confirmed at multiple schools as cases of the world’s deadliest infectious disease continue climbing across the state.
Fresno County officials confirmed a cluster at Justin Garza High School, where one active infection was found, though authorities did not specify whether the case involved a student or staff, according to ABC30.
Officials emphasized no one on campus is currently contagious, but 22 out of 169 people exposed have tested positive for the infection, though they show no symptoms yet.
… Meanwhile, San Diego County officials announced Wednesday a potential TB exposure was also reported at Sunset Elementary School in San Ysidro.
San Diego County has seen TB cases steadily rise in recent years, from 193 reported cases in 2020 to 265 in 2025.
These recent school exposures are just the latest in a troubling series of incidents unfolding across California.
Widburg doesn’t think it’s coincidental that this is happening in the Golden State. For California is, as historian Victor Davis Hanson put it in 2019, our first “Third World State.” And what are the TB disease vectors in this case?
It’s the Third World people, Widburg suspects — illegal aliens, that is — who’ve brought the disease back to California. And the state’s rampant vagrancy likely facilitates its spread.