ABSTRACT
In July 1994, La Quinta High School in Orange County, California, experienced the worst epidemic of drug-resistant tuberculosis ever reported in a secondary school in the United States. More troubling still, it could all be traced to a 16-year-old Vietnamese girl, an immigrant, who contracted the disease in her homeland. At a time when California’s governor, Republican Pete Wilson, was railing against the burden immigrants placed upon his state’s health care system and other politicians were lending their voices to a growing nativist chorus, Jody Meador, the local tuberculosis control officer, refused to join in. He told the press that the youngster bore no blame for what had happened:
The point that should be made is that regardless of the ethnicity of the source case, the problem originated largely as a result of a delay in diagnosis of treatment and not as a result of this source case being an immigrant. TB does not discriminate. It is everybody’s problem.2
