I don't think this is an issue, or rather the preferred solution for that seems to be to close borders and keep all the poor people out. Reminding the proponents of this "solution" that e.g. the people immigrating from Africa to the EU to ask for asylum may be carrying diseases that are not found in the Western world is likely to cause a hardening of the anti-immigration and anti-asylum stance, rather than any support for better hygiene in developing nations.
From a national point of view, it's simpler to keep homeless people away from rich peoples' homes than to make sure they don't get sick. So the self-interest argument is not really going to work with people who are already doing fine in their self-interest, they thank you.
Increasingly we are also seeing antibiotic-resistant bacteria from overseas reaching Australia through returning travellers.
https://www.news-medical.net/health/Global-travel-and-antibi...
Antibiotic resistance is also intricately linked to travel health and has many implications for travellers. Overuse of antibiotic medications for ailments such as traveller’s diarrhea has contributed to the spread of antibiotic resistance. In Southeast Asia, for example, ciprofloxacin and other fluoroquinolone antibiotics are no longer effective in treating traveller’s diarrhea since they are resistant to Campylobacter, Escherichia coli, Salmonella, and Shigella bacteria.
In Pakistan, extensively drug-resistant Typhoid Fever is growing since antibiotics such as ampicillin and ciprofloxacin no longer work. Cases have been reported in returning travellers from North America, the UK, Denmark and Australia. Travellers can be at the forefront of antimicrobial resistance – we are sentinels that can provide clues or alert researchers to developments on the ground.
https://www.iamat.org/blog/fighting-back-against-antibiotic-...
This may be a reaction to the opposite viewpoint that was popular in the old, WASP US, but I do think that it's been taken a bit too far now. If you think that "we treat homeless people like crap", ask yourself: would you wanted your own success or failure to be wholly attributed to circumstances out of your control? Would it feel good to be so stripped of agency?
For me personally, to respect a person also means to treat him more like a responsible adult and less than a mindless child.
The other notion is that of a lifestyle-choice, treating the homeless as if they are their own indigenous demographic, choosing to live a life outside the western method, and harmed only by western cultures insistence that everyone needs to fall in line. This argument usually skips over the dependence on western societies for basic needs, and whether anyone should get to just "opt out" of society in general, while still benefitting from societal supports.
Both are true to a limited extent, but absolutely false if used as a broad defence of the homeless, or the basis of policy.
There has to be a link between the autonomy a person is allowed, and the responsibility they bear for wielding that autonomy - this applies everywhere else too, from trust within communities, to authority within institutions.
The homeless are often treated differently, but sometimes they are treated more leniently the the norm as well. If they where treated the same as everyone else, they'd still find it difficult to get a job, or loan; but they'd also end up in jail a lot more too.
I don't know what "the hivemind" says, but being homeless is, indeed, "just luck"; in particular, misfortune- the kind that can befall anyone. If I understand correctly, in the US for instance, having a serious accident or falling seriously ill can lead to bankruptcy and homelessness, through no obvious fault of one's own (except perhaps people should not partake into dangerous activities like sports for recreation).
I've only been technically homeless and only slept on the street once in my entire life, but I have some time volunteering, talking and interacting with them, and in my personal experience, overwhelming majority of them are not just normal people who felt on hard times. I'm completely sure that if they took rational decisions and controlled their impulses, majority of them would not be where they are.
However, and this is a very important point: division between mental illness and bad decisions is very murky, so I'm not making any moral judgements here. But if a person suffers from a mental illness which leads him to make irrational decision, it is a tragedy, and this person is not at fault, but society doesn't become responsible for this awful situation either. It is moral and commendable to help these people — that's why I do it, for example. But there's a pretty huge gap between doing something out of kindness and having an obligation to.
Hey, do you have a specific source so that I can read further? I tried googling but to no avail.
He talks about it on his campaign website: https://joebiden.com/housing/
In the meantime, I've seen articles about "the return of Medieval diseases" to California on the front page of HN.
The reason this stuff should concern you is not simply compassion for the poorest of the poor but because disease can be caught by anyone. If you create conditions that serve as a breeding ground for serious illness in some people, you create conditions that put everyone at risk.
This is also why more developed countries need to be concerned with what goes on in less developed countries: We are breeding antibiotic resistant infections in some places due to a lack of adequate hygiene and then sometimes those people get medevaced elsewhere for treatment.
The issue here is not "Wow, we treat homeless people like crap!" Yeah, we do. The issue is "And even if you don't care how we treat homeless people, you should care that we are breeding diseases that we see as in the past and this puts everyone at risk."
Social justice issues are public health issues a la "The life you save may be your own."