Whatever4 wrote:
OK -- here's the masterpiece.
http://www.thefogbow.com/arpaio-report/Need: Edits and additions. Comments. Thanks!
I don't know if any of this is worth mentioning, but I wrote this a couple of years ago about the possibility of President Obama's mother traveling to Africa to give birth to him (links to my sources, if you need them, are here:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/07/2 ... log_503646 )
Based on when Barack and Stanley Ann Obama were known to be attending university classes in Hawaii, the absurd wingnut Birther theory is that she flew to Kenya around the 7th month of pregnancy and came home to Hawaii shortly after Barack Obama Jr. was born. To travel to Kenya in 1961, Stanley Ann would have had to get vaccinated against yellow fever. The African countries had implemented a strong yellow fever eradication program beginning in the 1940s. In 1960, there was a major outbreak of yellow fever in Ethiopia, with widespread activity in Kenya. PER JAMA:
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In the 1960s, epidemics occurred in both Africa and the Americas, causing thousands of cases in West Africa where vaccine coverage had waned or was absent ...
From 1960 to 1962, the largest outbreak to date in Africa occurred in southwest Ethiopia. Additional serologic studies confirmed that yellow fever activity was widespread in Uganda, Somalia, Ethiopia, and Kenya.*
*Henderson BE, Metselaar D, Cahill K, Timms GL, Tukei PM, Williams MC. Yellow fever immunity surveys in northern Uganda and Kenya and Eastern Somalia, 1966-1967. Bull World Health Organ. 1968;38:229-37.
Kenya is an area where yellow fever is endemic, and because of this--and because of malaria risks--pregnant woman even today are advised not to travel there. Obama was born in August, right in the middle of peak yellow fever season:
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YFV transmission in rural West Africa is seasonal, with elevated risk during the 2-4 months that the rainy season ends and the dry season begins (usually July-October);
The yellow fever vaccine is not safe for pregnant women to receive and was not administered to children under age 1; nor was the smallpox vaccine administered to children under age 1. Yet to enter the United States in 1961 from a country with endemic smallpox (like Kenya at the time), you had to have a vaccination certificate:
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Airport health officials were rather more rigorous in asking all arriving passengers where they had beeen in the preceding 14 days and requiring a valid vaccination certificate from all those who had been in a smallpox-endemic country during this period.
If Mrs. Obama had flown in to the United States from Africa without evidence of smallpox vaccination for her and her son, both likely would have been subject to quarantine--this was relatively routine.
Kenya was not declared nonendemic for smallpox until 1969. Kenya also had a high rate of malaria and tuberculosis and cases of cholera. This is not a likely destination for a woman in her 7th month of pregnancy (let alone ninth), and given the high infant mortality rate, it seems very unlikely Mrs. Obama's husband--by all accounts a highly intelligent man--would have decided to take her to Kenya at that time.
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I know that isn't an approach many people have discussed, but as a medical writer/editor, I've been involved in articles about vaccination requirements for pregnancy. I also have neighbors from Ghana who travel there regularly, and they told me I'd likely have to have a slew of vaccinations if I wanted to travel to Africa, which made me wonder what the requirements would have been for Mrs. Obama to travel to Africa during pregnancy and for a returning infant.
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