The real villain in TB jet flying case is the...?

Jun 4 2007

In the case of the jet set TB patient the plot continues to thicken as his parents and in-laws have both insisted Andrew Speaker was told he was not infectious.

The Atlanta lawyer is now in isolation after traveling to Europe with what is supposedly a dangerous form of tuberculosis and his family maintain he was uncertain if he was contagious.

Andrew Speaker along with his new wife, Sarah, and his parents who attended the couple's wedding in Greece last month, say the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) provided no help that would have allowed Speaker to avoid returning from Europe by a commercial flight.

An international health alert was triggered when Speaker seemingly defied U.S. health officials by flying to and from Europe for his wedding and honeymoon; he then re-entered the U.S. via the Canadian border while on a watch list for detention.

Mr Speaker was then placed under a federal isolation order for treatment for extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis, or XDR TB, a strain that is resistant to most antibiotics.

According to his father-in-law, Dr. Robert Cooksey, a researcher in the CDC's Division of Tuberculosis, under health guidelines Speaker was not contagious as tests have shown very little tuberculosis bacteria in sputum obtained from Speaker's lungs, which suggests it would be difficult, but not impossible, for him to transmit the disease.

Dr. Cooksey says the sputum tests were negative, and so by the guidelines, he was not considered infectious.

Mr. Speaker's family say they have recorded evidence that CDC officials confirmed he was not contagious and was supported by Cooksey's professional judgment.

So while Andrew Speaker has been presented by the media as acting selfishly, and putting the health of others at risk, the real culprit in the saga now appears to be the CDC.

In a meeting with the CDC prior to the trip the family, including father-in-law, tuberculosis specialist Dr. Robert Cooksey, were told that Mr. Speaker was not contagious.

It was only after the party left for Europe that the CDC reportedly sent a letter instructing Andrew Speaker not to fly, the letter sent in the U.S. mail was never received because the wedding group was already in Greece.

In Rome the couple learned that his tuberculosis was highly drug-resistant, but they were given no evidence to support this claim.

The CDC then ordered him not to take a commercial airline home but offered no assistance in getting him back to the United States.

Fear of being handed over to Italian authorities and quarantined indefinitely in a unknown hospital prompted the subsequent zig-zag route home to the U.S. to avoid authorities.

The families present as highly responsible and intelligent and the CDC is beginning to look incompetent in that it failed more than once, to communicate their concerns about Andrew being infectious, failed to notify him in an appropriate and timely manner and by giving Speaker and his wife no help whatsoever in returning to the United States.

The actions of the CDC are questionable and raise the suspicion that by invoking the first federal quarantine order in over forty years, which requires the signature of the President of the United States, that there was some other motive involved.

That quarantine order was lifted over the weekend accompanied by little if any major publicity.

However Mr. Speaker remains confined to a Denver hospital under an isolation order from the state of Colorado and the public must be forgiven for suspecting this is yet another case of 'overkill' given the repeated assertions of the "experts" at the CDC that he was non-infectious even before treatment.