.....officials said the man had recently been diagnosed with TB and knew when he left the United States on May 12 that he should not travel.
After testing revealed his tuberculosis was extensively drug-resistant, he was contacted in Europe by health authorities and told not to take a commercial flight home advice he also ignored.
Martin Cetron, a physician who directs CDCs Division of Global Migration and Quarantine, said he spoke to the man by phone Friday and directed him to go to a New York hospital. The man went willingly.
Although the man had broken the covenant of trust that is usually sufficient to keep infectious TB patients from willfully exposing others, from our perspective no laws were broken here, Gerberding said.
XDR-TB is rare in the United States, with only 49 cases detected since 1993, of which at least 12 were fatal, according to the CDC.
This month, public health officials in Arizona obtained a court order allowing them to confine and treat a 27-year-old dual Russian-U.S. citizen who had undergone months of TB treatment in Russia, where he had often been homeless. He is undergoing treatment for XDR-TB in a Phoenix hospital.