Passenger who flew with TB apologises

AN attorney quarantined with a dangerous strain of tuberculosis apologised to his fellow plane passengers in an interview yesterday, and insisted he was told he wasn’t contagious or a threat to anyone.

“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,” Andrew Speaker told ABC’s Good Morning America from his hospital room in Denver.

Speaking through a face- mask, Speaker said he, his doctors and the federal Centres for Disease Control and Prevention all knew he had TB that was resistant to front-line drugs before he flew to Europe for his wedding and honeymoon last month. But he said he was advised then that he wasn’t contagious or a danger to anyone.

Officials told him they would prefer he didn’t fly, but no one ordered him not to, he said.

Speaker, 31, from Atlanta, was in Europe when he learned tests showed he had not just TB, but an especially dangerous, extensively drug-resistant strain.

“He was told in no uncertain terms not to take a flight back,” said Dr Martin Cetron, director of the CDC’s division of global migration and quarantine.

He said he felt as if the CDC had suddenly “abandoned him.” At that point, he said, he believed if he didn’t get to the specialised clinic in Denver, he would die.

“Before I left, I knew that it was made clear to me, that in order to fight this, I had one shot, and that was going to be in Denver,” he said. If doctors in Europe tried to treat him and it went wrong, he said, “it’s very real that I could have died there”.

Even though US officials had put Speaker on a warning list, he caught a flight to Montreal and then drove across the US border on May 24 at Champlain, NY. A border inspector who checked him disregarded a computer warning to stop Speaker, officials said Thursday.

The next day, Speaker became the first infected person quarantined by the US government since 1963.

Dr Charles Daley, chief of the National Jewish Hospital’s infectious disease division, said he is optimistic Speaker can be cured because he appears to be in the early stages of the disease.