Tuberculosis makes a comeback in San Francisco

 by Andrea Widburg

The headline on a San Francisco news website is stunning: “‘This is a big outbreak’: Nearly 1 in 5 affected by TB at SF school.” Certainly, when I was growing up and living in San Francisco, such a headline would have been unimaginable, but now tuberculosis is a growing problem in California, a state with the single largest illegal immigrant population in America.

According to SFGATE:

New data shows 18%, or nearly 1 in 5, of tested students and staff at Archbishop Riordan High School in San Francisco were diagnosed with either latent or active tuberculosis during an outbreak that started in November. 

New testing is scheduled to start today. 

In total, 96% of the school community was tested, seven people were diagnosed with active cases during the course of the outbreak and 241 latent cases were reported, according to data released by the San Francisco Department of Public Health on April 27 to the school community. (Emphasis mine.)

[snip]

Tuberculosis remains a problem for California, where cases hit a 12-year high in 2025 with 2,150 reported. The state also had a “substantially higher” rate of disease in 2025 than the U.S. overall, the department said, with 5.4 infections per 100,000 people compared with about 3 per 100,000 nationwide.

The news about Riordan follows reports from last week that two California high schools—one in San Diego, in the southernmost part of the state, and one in Fresno, in Central California—had experienced TB outbreaks. TB’s surge in both those regions made sense, given

 that they are where most of California’s enormous illegal alien population clusters. And yes, the fact that they’re illegal matters, because it means that they come from impoverished countries rife with disease, enter the U.S. without any medical barriers, and live in densely populated communities. All lawful applicants to America are screened for TB.

But San Francisco? That’s quite far from the Southern border. However, it turns out that San Francisco, which has long been a sanctuary city, is estimated to be home to around 43,000 illegal aliens, out of a population of only 800,000-850,000 people. That’s a lot of illegal aliens in a small, densely populated city.

That Riordan would be hit isn’t a surprise. It’s located near one of the largest Hispanic communities in San Francisco. Ocean Avenue, two blocks from the school, is both a major transportation artery in that part of the city and a dividing line between those communities and Riordan.

What this means is that kids riding the buses along Ocean Avenue are almost certainly routinely exposed to immigrants, many of whom may have arrived unchecked through our southern border. It wouldn’t surprise me if that was a primary vector. I wonder how many of the students’ parents contemplated this possibility.

Since time immemorial, one of the reasons nations have policed their borders has been to keep out diseases. Thanks to the Democrats’ open-door policy for illegal aliens, America has seen a resurgence of third-world diseases that had once become alien to America, things such as measles, TB, whooping cough, and even polio and dengue fever.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/05/tuberculosis_makes_a_comeback_in_san_francisco.html