Five-year-old Briany nibbled her nails as she peeked from behind her mother. Her eyes rimmed with dark circles, she continued to ask if she could go out to play. Her mother, Gladis, shook her head.
Briany is being treated for Shigellosis, a diarrheal disease caused by the Shigella group of bacteria, which according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is behind about 500,000 cases of diarrhea each year in the US. Briany lives with her mother as a detainee at the Berks County Residential Center in Leesport, Pennsylvania.
Her case is a worrying one, which the Pennsylvania department of human services has reported to the US Department of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Briany’s condition, it is alleged, went untreated for weeks, exposing more than 40 other children of migrant mothers to a highly infectious disease.
A team of UN experts has issued a “stark warning about surging Israeli settler terror” in...
