TB globe-trotter flies home alone!

Jul 30 2007

Globe trotting tuberculosis victim, American lawyer Andrew Speaker, has been released from hospital and has returned home.

Speaker triggered an international health panic when he flew to Europe despite supposedly being told he had a rare and contagious form of tuberculosis (TB).

Speaker has flown home but this time in an air ambulance in order to avoid 'public alarm' and though no longer contagious he will have to take antibiotics for two more years.

At the time of the scare officials say he was advised against travelling but Speaker and his family maintain this was not the case.

After zigzagging across Europe on various airlines Mr. Speaker and his wife eventually returned to the U.S. by slipping through the Canadian border in a car.

Since his return he has been in isolation in a Denver hospital where it was found that he actually had a less serious form of TB than first thought.

Mr Speaker was initially diagnosed with extensively-drug-resistant, or X-DR, tuberculosis but further tests found he had the multi-drug-resistant strain, which is still severe but easier to treat.

Doctors at the National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver, say Mr Speaker was healthy enough to return home to Georgia on a commercial flight and they expect him to return to a full and active life.

Speaker has spent eight weeks in the hospital where he underwent surgery to remove part of a lung with a tennis-ball-sized lump of infection.

Dr. Gwen Huitt, director of the hospital's adult infectious disease care unit says Mr Speaker was not completely cured and they believe some TB bacteria remain in his lungs, which ongoing antibiotic therapy should kill.

TB is rare in the United States and last year there were 13,767 recorded cases or 4.6 cases per 100,000 Americans.