How are things in Portland, Oregon, as the calendar flips over from 2023 to 2024? If you had an epidemic of feces-borne illness spread by sexual intercourse and uncleanliness on your list of plagues that would befall the liberal hellhole, congratulations: You win.
According to KGW-TV, officials with the Multnomah County Health Department issued a warning after a spike in cases of shigella, mostly centered around the homeless communities in the Old Town neighborhood of Portland.
“When a KGW crew was in Old Town on Tuesday, they found several homeless people sick with similar symptoms,” the station reported on Dec. 26.
“Ricky, who said he’s been homeless for years, has been struggling with a high fever, fatigue and vomiting for the past few days. Jade Elliot, another homeless person, described their symptoms.”
“I was just puking and just going to the bathroom,” Elliot told the station.
Trending:
A contagious illness called Shigella is spreading through Portland’s Old Town neighborhood and sending people to the hospital.
It spreads through fecal matter and symptoms can last three to ten days.
“I spent Christmas at Providence Hospital. This is not a game.”@KGWNews pic.twitter.com/1iB3ARZc9w
— Blair Best (@blairgbest) December 26, 2023
Michael Lynn Moreland Jr. said he found out he had shigella after checking into a detox program.
“When I went to Fora Health, I couldn’t hold any food down. It’s gross, but I soiled my clothes. It’s disgusting. To the point where they weren’t medically equipped for it,” he said.
Do you agree liberalism has destroyed Portland?
“I couldn’t even leave my room because it’s that contagious,” he added, saying that homeless people could get it “even just sharing a cigarette with someone that you don’t know … Sharing a vaporizer pen if it has fecal matter on it and you ingest that, you get that infection.”
“I spent Christmas at Providence Hospital. This is not a game,” he said.
No, shigella definitely isn’t a game, with those who contract the bacterial infection beginning to experience symptoms one or two days after exposure, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
WARNING: The following descriptions contain graphic language that some viewers may find disturbing
Symptoms include “diarrhea that can be bloody or prolonged (lasting more than 3 days), Fever, stomach pain and feeling the need to pass stool even when the bowels are empty.”
“Symptoms usually last 5 to 7 days, but some people may experience symptoms anywhere from a few days to 4 or more weeks. In some cases, it may take several months before bowel habits (for example, how often someone passes stool and the consistency of their stool) are entirely normal,” the CDC’s website says.
Rare but serious symptoms can include reactive arthritis, seizures, and bloodstream infections.
Multnomah County warned that same-sex male partners and homeless individuals were most at risk of contracting the virus, according to the U.K. Daily Mail. Forty-five cases of the virus were reported in Portland in December alone, which brought the total number in 2023 to 218. How reported numbers match up with actual numbers, given its spread among the homeless population, is anyone’s guess.
“Current disease patterns in Multnomah County suggest that fecal-oral spread through sexual contact may account for between half or two-thirds of all cases without international travel,” said Teresa Everson, Multnomah County deputy health officer.
“These cases can occur because bathrooms, hand-washing sinks and soap can be hard to access when you aren’t housed. And unhoused community members are at higher risk of infectious diseases in general, as they experience poorer health than the broader public.”
“We have not seen cases of folks in the general public who have acquired infection that we can’t explain,” she added. “Most of the cases that we are seeing are associated with sexual activity, and some with travel. So we do not have any cases that would point us to a risk to the general public.”
Perhaps you notice the language here, which indeed points toward the real problem.
While one doesn’t expect Everson or anyone else in Multnomah County officialdom to call deviant sexual behavior what it is — that being reserved mostly for preachers and clerics in the year of our Lord 2024 — phrases like “when you aren’t housed” or “unhoused community members” indicate that a shigella outbreak is merely a symptom of the root disease: a case of wokeness that Portland contracted eons ago and which frequent doses of reality shock treatment has yet to rid the city of.
Consider that, despite the rampant homelessness — sorry, “unhoused community growth” — and other manifestations of progressive-induced chaos in the city (antifa radicals, open-air drug use, multifarious other crimes), the city pledged to spend $750 million last year on “advancing an equitable, climate-resilient Portland.” They won’t have to worry by the time that matters, methinks; even if anthropogenic climate change is the disaster our hyperventilating, tree-clutching Pacific Northwest brethren think it will be, anyone with the resources to actually pay for that plan will mostly have moved out due to other factors long before it matters.
In fact, quality of life issues have progressed to such a malignant phase in Portland that ten plaintiffs sued the city in 2022 for violating the Americans with Disabilities Act by allowing homeless encampments to litter city sidewalks, thus impeding blind and other disabled residents who wished to walk on them. (Which, in case the name wasn’t a giveaway, is what sidewalks were originally designed for.)
And the city, by the way, is actively encouraging homelessness. (Or “unhomedness,” whatever you want to call it.) In 2019, it’s worth noting, the city’s Planning and Sustainability Commission approved a plan allowing individuals in a non-homed state to “rest” on private property; the commission told the city in a letter that “we suggest making it even more clear that development should provide supportive space for people to feel welcome and safe and should allow space for people to rest, especially under our current housing shortage.”
Of course, reasonable city planners might have offered developers incentives to create affordable housing via loosening zoning restrictions and creating a hospitable environment for those who might buy or rent it by cracking down on crime, drug use, riots, homeless encampments, and other quality-of-life issues. But Portland isn’t reasonable — and that’s why they’re now struggling with a shigella outbreak on top of everything else.
Keep up the good work into 2024, Multnomah County.
