Posted on 05/31/2007 4:28:06 PM PDT by Baladas
ATLANTA - A globe-trotting Atlanta lawyer with a dangerous strain of tuberculosis was allowed back into the U.S. by a border inspector who disregarded a computer warning to stop him and don protective gear, officials said Thursday. The inspector has been removed from border duty.
The unidentified inspector explained that he was no doctor but that the infected man seemed perfectly healthy and that he thought the warning was merely "discretionary," officials briefed on the case told The Associated Press. They spoke on condition of anonymity because the matter is still under investigation.
The patient was identified as Andrew Speaker, a 31-year-old personal injury lawyer who returned last week from his wedding and honeymoon trip through Italy, the Greek isles and other spots in Europe. His new father-in-law, Robert C. Cooksey, is a CDC microbiologist whose specialty is TB and other bacteria.
Cooksey would not comment on whether he reported his son-in-law to federal health authorities. Nor did the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention explain how the case came to their attention. However, Cooksey said that neither he nor his CDC laboratory was the source of his son-in-law's TB.
Speaker is now under quarantine at a hospital in Denver. He is the first infected person to be quarantined by the U.S. government since 1963.
The disclosure that the patient is a lawyer — and specifically a personal injury lawyer — outraged many people on the Internet and elsewhere. Some travelers who flew on the same planes with Speaker angrily accused him of selfishly putting hundreds of people's lives in danger.
"It's still very scary," 21-year-old Laney Wiggins, one of more than two dozen University of South Carolina-Aiken students who are getting skin tests for TB. "That is an outrageous number of people that he was very reckless with their health. It's not fair. It's selfish."
Speaker said in a newspaper interview that he knew he had TB when he flew from Atlanta to Europe in mid-May for his wedding and honeymoon, but that he did not find out until he was already in Rome that it was an extensively drug-resistant strain considered especially dangerous.
Despite warnings from federal health officials not to board another long flight, he flew home for treatment, fearing he wouldn't survive if he didn't reach the U.S., he said. He said he tried to sneak home by way of Canada instead of flying directly into the U.S.
He was quarantined May 25, a day after he was allowed to pass through the border crossing at Champlain, N.Y., along the Canadian border.
The inspector ran Speaker's passport through a computer, and a warning — including instructions to hold the traveler, don a protective mask in dealing with him, and telephone health authorities — popped up, officials said. About a minute later, Speaker was instead cleared to continue on his journey, according to officials familiar with the records.
The Homeland Security Department is investigating.
"The border agent who questioned that person is at present performing administrative duties," said Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke, adding those duties do not include checking people at the land border crossing.
Colleen Kelley, president of the union that represents customs and border agents, declined to comment on the specifics of the case, but said "public health issues were not receiving adequate attention and training" within the agency.
On Thursday, a tan and healthy-looking Speaker was flown from Atlanta to Denver, accompanied by his wife and federal marshals, to Denver's National Jewish Medical and Research Center, where doctors planned to isolate him and treat him with oral and intravenous antibiotics.
Dr. Charles Daley, chief of the hospital's infectious-disease division, said he is optimistic Speaker can be cured because he is believed to be in the early stages of the disease.
Dr. Gwen Huitt of National Jewish described Speaker as "a young, healthy individual" who is "doing extremely well."
"By conventional methods that we traditionally use in the public health arena ... he would be considered low infectivity at this point in time," she said. "He is not coughing, he is healthy, he does not have a fever."
Doctors hope also to determine where he contracted the disease, which has been found around the world and exists in pockets in Russia and Asia.
He will be kept in a special unit with a ventilation system to prevent the escape of germs. "He may not leave that room much for several weeks," hospital spokesman William Allstetter said.
Speaker's father-in-law has worked at the CDC for 32 years and is in the Division of Tuberculosis Elimination, where he works with TB and other organisms. He has co-authored papers on diabetes, TB and other infectious diseases.
"As part of my job, I am regularly tested for TB. I do not have TB, nor have I ever had TB," he said in a statement. "My son-in-law's TB did not originate from myself or the CDC's labs, which operate under the highest levels of biosecurity."
In a brief telephone interview with the AP, Cooksey said that he gave Speaker "fatherly advice" when he learned the young man had contracted the disease.
"I'm hoping and praying that he's getting the proper treatment, that my daughter is holding up mentally and physically," Cooksey said. "Had I known that my daughter was in any risk, I would not allow her to travel."
According to a biography posted on a Web site connected with Speaker's law firm, the young lawyer attended the U.S. Naval Academy, graduated from the University of Georgia with a degree in finance, then attended University of Georgia's law school. He is in private practice with his father, Ted Speaker, an unsuccessful candidate for a judgeship in 2004.
Speaker's father told WSB-TV: "The way he's been shown and spoken about on TV, it's like a terrorist traveling around the world escaping authorities. It's blown out of proportion immensely."
Andrew Speaker recently moved from an upscale condominium complex in anticipation of his wedding, former neighbors said. He also wrote in an application to become a board member of his condo association that he was going to Vietnam for five weeks as part of the Rotary Club to act as an ambassador.
His wife, Sarah, is a third-year law student at Atlanta's Emory University.
"He's a great guy. Gregarious," said Pam Hood, a former neighbor. "He's a wonderful guy. Just a very, very pleasant man."
Health officials in North America and Europe are now trying to track down about 80 passengers who sat near him on his two trans-Atlantic flights, and they want passenger lists from four shorter flights he took while in Europe.
However, other passengers are not considered at high risk of infection because tests indicated the amount of TB bacteria in Speaker was low, said Dr. Martin Cetron, director of the CDC's division of global migration and quarantine.
Health law experts said Speaker could be sued if others contract TB.
"There are a number of cases that say a person who negligently transmits an infectious disease could be held liable," said Lawrence Gostin, a public health law expert at Georgetown University. "So long as he knew it was infectious, and knew about the appropriate behavior but failed to comply, he could be held liable."
Speaker told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that he wasn't coughing and that doctors initially did not order him not to fly and only suggested he put off his long-planned wedding. "We headed off to Greece thinking everything's fine," he told the newspaper.
Our terrorist enemies just found another way to kill Americans by the thousands. Sometimes they must be amazed at our government’s feckless stupidity.
The border patrol agent should be fired.
Speaker should be incarcerated.
Speaker’s father should be placed on leave while the CDC determines whether he should be fired.
Meanwhile, elderly women and young children will be forced to remove their shoes and Caucasian and East Asian women will be selected at random for extensive scrutiny at our airports. Even though none has ever been even implicated in an act of terror or endangerment of the American people.
Our supposed “Homeland Security” department is not only staffed, but headed, by incompetent bullies like Michael Chertoff. They act tough around people they can push around, but shrink from anyone from whom they should be protecting us.
So how do you know more than the CDC per the Atlanta Journal Constitution?
While he was honeymooning in Rome, CDC officials asked him to agree to indefinite isolation in an Italian hospital. Instead he fled. Despite the CDC putting the man on airlines’ “no fly” lists and having his passport flagged, the man and his bride were able to elude health authorities and sneak back into the United States by flying to Canada and driving across the border last week.
Indefinite isolation in a foreign country for a non-threatening malady?
Tuberculosis is hardly “non-threatening.”
It’s a horrible disease that ravages its victims. I remember the rural hospitals in which TB victims were quarantined. I know people whose grandparents and great uncles died from the disease. It’s not a pretty sight, and far worse to experience.
This nation worked incredibly hard to eliminate Third World ravages like polio (I know several, including close family memebers, crippled by it), smallpox, tuberculosis, cholera (another terrible illness), encephalitis, and dengue fever.
Now our political class are rolling the red carpet across the Mexican border to where most of these diseases flourish. At the same time, the incompetent fools that head and staff our “Homeland Security” look away as people they know are infected with these diseases travel on our aircraft and enter our country.
What is wrong with these people?
Very strong agreement!
Further thought, when I was a kid in the 50s my Mom was deathly afraid of TB.
We made so much progress in public health, how can we let it slip away?
They should be able to trace any mutations in the organism to one that the CDC had possession of.
Everyone catch the VA hospital, cream of rice cereal anthrax scare today??
BA
It’s not permanently non-threatening, since if left untreated it will progress and become very contagious.
But look at this from the point of view of the patient, who had already been told repeatedly that he poses little risk of transmission due to his complete lack of symptoms, and knows that he’s been carrying this bug and running around in close proximity to lots of people for many months, though he’s just now been told it’s totally drug-resistant. He also knows that his new wife, who he’s been making out with for at last the past few months, still tests negative for any form of TB so he’s got a first-hand example of how low his ability to trnsmit the disease is.
A few days ago he was led to believe he had a treatable form of TB, and that he could look forward to a long happy life with his new bride. Now he’s got some CDC guy calling him in a panic, telling him he’s got a deadly disease for which there’s no reliable treatment, and asking him to stay “indefinitely” in a hospital in a foreign country, where he doesn’t speak the language, doesn’t know what his legal rights are, and knows little or nothing about the quality of the medical care system, and he’s thinking he’s going to be left to die there. Little wonder he bolted. What’s much less understandable is why the CDC couldn’t predict that. From everything I’ve read, it doesn’t seem that they offered him any assurance that they’d arrange to transport him home within a few days, and just needed him to stay in an Italian hospital until the special travel arrangements could be made. THAT would almost certainly have secured his cooperation.
The CDC’s response to this guy’s illness has been unpredictable and irrational, and now they’re trying to look like super-duper protectors of public health by going way overboard with their handling of the case. The chances that anybody got infected by this guy are very close to zero, and are the same for the recent airline travellers that the CDC is now making a big show of trying to track down and notify and test (test for what? it’s not like they’d test positive this soon even if they did catch it) as for all the people he’s come in close proximity to over the past months while neither he nor the CDC had thought there was any reason to put him under tight restrictions.
Why don’t we have border security?
Officials told him they would prefer he didn't fly, but no one ordered him not to, he said. Speaker said his father, also a lawyer, taped that meeting. ''My father said, 'OK, now are you saying, prefer not to go on the trip because he's a risk to anybody, or are you simply saying that to cover yourself?' And they said, we have to tell you that to cover ourself, but he's not a risk.''
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