Day by day, revelation by revelation, the case of TB patient/honeymooner Andrew Speaker grows more bizarre and outrageous.
Speaker, a 31-year-old Atlanta attorney, knew he had tuberculosis when he left Atlanta in mid-May for his wedding and honeymoon in Europe. He said he felt fine and apparently health officials didn’t insist that he not fly. He wasn’t informed until he was in Rome that he had an especially dangerous form of TB that is extensively drug-resistant and thus difficult to treat.
And that’s where the outrageous part begins. While Speaker and officials clash on some points, they seem to agree on this: While Speaker was in Rome, he was specifically warned not to fly on commercial airlines. He was cautioned by American health officials that he could be contagious. But he flew anyway. And because he did, scores of passengers who were on the same flights are now being sought to undergo tests, to see if they’ve been infected.
On Friday, Speaker apologized to them. “I’ve lived in this state of constant fear and anxiety and exhaustion for a week now, and to think that someone else is now feeling that, I wouldn’t want anyone to feel that way. It’s awful,” he told ABC from a Denver hospital room.
Yes, it is awful. But that doesn’t change the facts. What he did was reckless, selfish and unconscionable. If someone who has HIV knowingly exposes another person, he or she can be charged with a felony in many states, including Illinois. How is that much different from ignoring a direct warning from medical authorities and potentially infecting someone else with a particularly dangerous strain of TB?
Certainly Speaker feared for his life after being told of his diagnosis. And he didn’t lack for medical advice: In one of the more bizarre twists, his new father-in-law is a CDC microbiologist whose specialty is TB and other bacteria.Speaker said he believed he would die if he didn’t return to the U.S.
Since he said he had been told that his name had been put on a no-fly list and his passport was flagged, he and his wife apparently took a circuitous route back into the U.S. They didn’t seem to have much trouble staying one step ahead of authorities. They flew from Prague to Montreal, then drove into the U.S.
The mystery of how he crossed the border without being stopped was cleared up Thursday: A border inspector ignored a computer warning to stop Speaker. The guard said he thought the warning was “discretionary,” the Associated Press reported.
It doesn’t take much of an imagination to figure how these lapses could have resulted in something far worse, if someone actually intended to cause harm.
All of this doesn’t suggest huge, expensive overhauls of the nation’s public health system are necessary. But the Speaker case does remind us, as one CDC official said, that when it comes to curbing dangerous outbreaks of disease, the public health system still largely relies “on people to do the right thing.” Many do. Andrew Speaker didn’t.
