Posted on 05/31/2007 6:45:51 AM PDT by Zakeet
The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit claiming Maricopa County officials have violated the rights of a quarantined tuberculosis patient for months by treating him like a criminal.
The U.S. District Court complaint filed Wednesday on behalf of Robert Daniels alleges that health officials and the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office have violated numerous constitutional rights and the Americans with Disabilities Act.
The suit seeks what it calls appropriate accommodations for Daniels, rather than severe and "inhumane" jail conditions.
"It's good news for me," Daniels said Wednesday evening. "I finally have a chance to get out of this black hole."
[Snip]
Daniels moved to Arizona in January 2006 after contracting extreme multi-drug-resistant TB. Daniels, who spent his teen years in Scottsdale, said he returned to the U.S. from Russia in search of work and a college education.
Months later, after he became severely ill, Daniels was placed in a county sanitarium for indigent TB patients. Dr. Maricela Moffitt, a county physician, has testified that Daniels failed to take his medications and that decreased the likelihood that last-chance drugs would cure his deadly disease.
Moffitt claims Daniels endangered others by going out in public and entertaining visitors without wearing a mask.
[Snip]
In his defense, Daniels has insisted that he did not understand the contagiousness or gravity of his condition.
(Excerpt) Read more at azstarnet.com ...
Then he is mentally incompetent and must be isolated for the public good. You have no right to endanger the public health. This is a shot at publicity.
It is about time. WE have a TB epidemic, 13,000 cases a year. Sometimes I think the Public Health sector just ignores epidemics to enrich the health care sector. One night I found a doc doing research on drug resistant TB. The only thing he had found to control it was nicotine. So I use that as a comeback to docs who ask me to stopsmoking. You control TB, first.
Daniels is not the guy who went to Greece. This is a different guy, an older case. But he certainly sounds like a dummy.
The ACLU can contact all those people which had ‘German measles’ up through the 1950s. They were quarantined also. Signs on home doors read, “No one out. No one in!”
We should place Mr. Daniels in a luxury suite in a swanky hotel.
And, since the ACLU attorneys don’t think it’s any “big deal” having Mr. Daniels around other people, they should move in with him.
Or at LEAST give him an INTERNSHIP at their offices.
Is this Daniels guy the same one that had flown to europe and back?
No.
Just who in the hell does this jackass think he is? And screw the ACLU. This rotten organization is so darn anti-American they should be rode on a rail out of the US. Better still lets just get the lawyers for the ACLU to visit him and hope this nut coughs.
This is a different guy.
GOOD! Another reason not to quit. Thank you!
This will be an interesting legal battle. Manadatory quarantines, from the thread of the guy with TB who flew in from Europe, haven’t been done since 1963. That’s before the ADA, which the ACLU is citing. If anything, it will help clarify the law. But this guy needs to be isolated if he refuses to mitigate the risks he poses to the community.
This is a different guy from the story that broke yesterday.
I see this as no different than someone with AIDS engaging in unprotected sex with someone without telling them they are infected.
I wonder who the ACLU would support in such a case?
From what I know, this drug resistant TB developed and is spread in prisons. So is AIDS, btw. These men may well be excons. WE have a huge flap over prisons just waiting to take off.
Isn’t that the sad truth. There’s a reckoning coming.
WHEN are these pos the aclu going to be held accountable for frivolous lawsuits and WHY does the taxpayer foot the bill for them! WHAT on earth is this world coming to.
Yep. Although both have the Russian connection.
If an individual is determined to expose innocents to a deadly, communicable disease, then the authorities are duty bound to quarantine him.
The ACLU needs to pound sand.
So I guess we found someone who wants to take they guy in?
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