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The leader of the Afghan Taliban, Mullah Mohammed Omar, has died, Afghan officials say, but the militant group has not commented on the claim. The reclusive leader died two to three years ago, Afghan government and intelligence sources said. No further details were released. A Taliban spokesman contacted by the BBC said the group would issue a statement shortly. There have been several reports of Mullah Omar’s death in the past. However, this is the first to be confirmed by top sources in the Afghan government. …

A federal judge in California has ruled that the Obama administration’s detention of children and their mothers who were caught crossing the border illegally is a serious violation of a longstanding court settlement, and that the families should be released as quickly as possible. In a decision late Friday roundly rejecting the administration’s arguments for holding the families, Judge Dolly M. Gee of Federal District Court for the Central District of California found that two detention centers in Texas that the administration opened last summer fail to meet minimum legal requirements of the 1997 settlement for facilities housing children. -snip-...

Donald Trump doubled down on his controversial comments about illegal immigration from Mexico on Monday, saying, "infectious disease is pouring across the border." Trump issued a lengthy — nearly 900 word — statement invoking the death of a San Francisco woman shot and killed last week by a suspect who had previously been deported to Mexico five times. "This is merely one of thousands of similar incidents throughout the United States," Trump said Monday. "In other words, the worst elements in Mexico are being pushed into the United States by the Mexican government." The 2016 Republican presidential candidate said Mexican...

A female patient with an extremely hard-to-treat form of tuberculosis is being treated at the National Institutes of Health outside Washington D.C., and federal and state officials are now tracking down hundreds of people who may have been in contact with her. The woman traveled to at least three states before she sought treatment from a U.S. doctor. While TB is not easily caught by casual contact, extensively drug resistant (XDR) TB is so dangerous that health officials will have to make a concerted effort to warn anyone who may be at risk.

Most people who visit Calistoga -- a town in the Napa Valley -- come for the wine and the spa treatments; few come for the literary history. But they could: one of the most romantic honeymoon getaways ever written about happened one hundred and thirty five years ago. Instead of mud baths and geysers, picture an abandoned mining shack infested with snakes, poison oak, and rusty nails. Now picture a sickly writer and his new wife spending their first two months of married life living there. Sounds crazy, right? But that’s exactly what Robert Louis Stevenson — author of the...

On Friday, Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar, along with Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick (D-AZ) and Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Jeff Flake (R-AZ), sent a letter to DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson and ICE Deputy Assistant Secretary Saldaña warning them not to release an illegal immigrant with drug-resistant tuberculosis into the general public. http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/04/03/exclusive-illegal-immigrant-with-drug-resistant-tb-to-be-released-into-us-say-congressional-leaders/

OLATHE, Kan. (AP) — More than two dozen cases of tuberculosis have been detected at an eastern Kansas high school after widespread screening, state and county health officials announced Wednesday. More than 300 Olathe Northwest High School students and staff members were tested after coming into contact with an infected student. In addition to that student, the testing revealed 27 new cases of TB that hadn’t progressed to the contagious stage, the Johnson County Health Department said in a news release. Officials began calling the people who tested positive on Monday, while those with no sign of infection will receive...

OLATHE, Kan. (AP) — Twenty-seven more people have tested positive for tuberculosis at an eastern Kansas high school. State and county health officials made the announcement Wednesday after tests were conducted on more than 300 Olathe Northwest High School students and staff members who came into contact with an infected student.

About a thousand people still contract tuberculosis daily in Europe and Central Asia, despite an overall decline of the disease, a report by the Europe Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) revealed Tuesday (17 March). The report, co-authored with the World Health Organization (WHO), said the continent would not be free of the disease until the next century at the current low rate of eradication, particularly due to prevalence in countries to the east of the region. “Multi-resistance tuberculosis (MDR-TB) is still ravaging the European region, making it the most affected area of the entire world,” Zsuzsanna Jakab, WHO...

Scientists at Northeastern University have discovered an antibiotic in the soil that looks to be effective at killing deadly pathogens like MRSA and tuberculosis. Even more promising, lead researcher Kim Lewis says those pathogens weren't able to develop a resistance to the antibiotic.

During last summer’s border crisis, left-wing and mainstream media outlets mocked Americans who were concerned that illegal immigrants may be carrying disease like Tuberculosis. But in a story downplaying the measles threat from Mexico and Central America, the Los Angeles Times concedes that, “beyond measles, however, there are some serious diseases that are brought to the United States from Mexico and Central America.” Tuberculosis is chief among those diseases, according to the Times, which noted that “in 2013, 65% of the tuberculosis cases in the U.S. occurred among foreign-born people”: A majority of those people came from five countries: Mexico...

If last year’s experience at Grant High School is any guide, news that a Florin High School student recently tested positive for tuberculosis may spark a worrisome period of months of testing larger pools of students and school staff for TB.

Although M. tuberculosis probably first emerged some 40,000 years ago in Africa, the disease did not take hold until humans took to farming... A previous analysis by his team had shown that the common ancestor of all the M. bacterium strains circulating today began spreading around 10,000 years ago in the ancient Fertile Crescent, a region stretching from Mesopotamia to the Nile Delta that was a cradle of agriculture... 4,987 samples of the Beijing lineage from 99 countries... the information to date the expansion of the lineage and show how the strains are related... the Beijing lineage did indeed emerge...

The “humanitarian crisis” concocted by President Obama to let tens of thousands of illegal immigrant minors stay in the U.S. has fueled a deadly respiratory virus epidemic that’s struck American kids across the country and killed at least nine. Virtually nonexistent in the U.S. before the recent influx of illegal alien minors, the lethal Enterovirus D68 (EV-D68) is associated with severe respiratory illness and is known to come from Central America. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from mid-August to the end of October state public health laboratories have confirmed a total of 1,105 people in...

Endemic diseases that don't make headlines, like tuberculosis, malaria, and infectious childhood diarrhea, each kill more people every two days than have died of Ebola in 28 years. The Ebola Monster is Peaking; the Real Ones Are Not In a sense, everything you need to know about the veracity of those nightmarish Ebola epidemic projections was summarized in the October 14 press conference held by the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Ebola head, Bruce Aylward. He said: currently there were about a thousand new cases a week; • it’s “too early to say” whether “the epidemic [is] slowing down” [emphasis added]...

Haitians eligible to receive green cards in two years soon will be able to wait it out in the United States rather than in Haiti under an expedited family reunification program announced Friday by the Obama administration. Beginning early next year, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security will implement the Haitian Family Reunification Parole (HFRP) Program to accelerate the reunification of eligible Haitian family members of U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents, who are living in Haiti and have already been approved for a family-based immigrant visa. There are approximately 100,000 Haitians in the immigration pipeline in Haiti but only...

Key House Republicans say congressional action on immigration is much more likely if Republicans take control of the Senate. The effort, two Republicans say, would likely involve individual measures rather than a broad, comprehensive bill favored by Democrats. "I actually think it's more likely, if we take the Senate, that we will have immigration reform," said Rep. Raul Labrador. "We will be able to do it on a step-by-step approach like most Republicans have been asking to do and I think the American people want." Labrador, who was a member of the bipartisan House group working on the issue before...

LYNN, Mass. — More than 30 Lynn Community Health Center employees and 800 patients are being tested to determine if they were exposed to tuberculosis after center doctors confirmed a case.

When Europeans came to the Americas, they brought some nasty diseases — smallpox, cholera and typhus, to name a few.But one pathogen was already there. And it likely traveled to the shores of South America in a surprising vessel.By analyzing DNA from 1,000-year-old mummies, scientists have found evidence that sea lions and seals were the first to bring tuberculosis to the New World. The sea animals likely infected people living along the coast of Peru and northern Chile, a team from the University of Tubingen in Germany reported Wednesday in the journal Nature."We weren't expecting to find a connection to...

Unaccompanied illegal immigrant children with communicable diseases have given or exposed federal agents to lice, scabies, tuberculosis and chicken pox, according to a report issued Thursday by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General. In two cases, the children of a border patrol agent got chicken pox contracted from their parents’ exposure to unaccompanied children with chicken pox, according to the report on conditions of detention centers and border facilities. The report, the first in a series, is based on 87 unannounced visits to 63 detention centers being used to house unaccompanied alien children (UAC) in Texas, Arizona...