So, all our expensive, intrusive security efforts are for naught, not to mention the “greatest health care system in the world.” Truth be told, I understand. Human endeavors are inevitably fraught with human failings. No system is foolproof.
But what a fool Patient Zero — Mr. Speaker — is. Or thinks we are. Look at the steps he took to make sure he got his honeymoon no matter what. I can’t think of someone who zigzags like he did, even driving across the border, rather than fly, as a mere innocent. He’s a selfish fool who is now doing a great job of making himself sound like the victim in the process. He sincerely hopes procedures are improved thanks to this. Like arresting TB patients? Not that I’d wish TB on him for his selfishness. I just wish he’d say, “hey, I thought I deserved a last fling before treatment.” Selfishness is human; lying makes it worse.
I recommend you rent Twelve Monkeys, a brilliant movie with a very interesting intersection with this story. mjh
CDC: Staffer focused initially on public health, not jet, By ALISON YOUNG, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Speaker has said that he never would have left the United States for his long-planned wedding in Greece and honeymoon around Europe if he had been told he was a threat to anyone. He said Fulton County health officials, who had been overseeing his TB case since January, told him he was not contagious.
http://www.ajc.com/health/content/health/stories/2007/06/05/0605meshcdc.html
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TB Patient Denies Running From CDC
The globe-trotting tuberculosis patient now in quarantine insisted to Congress on Wednesday that doctors told him he wasn’t contagious and didn’t order him to stay in the United States for treatment — even as health officials painted a picture of a man on the run.
“I didn’t go running off or hide from people. It’s a complete fallacy, it’s a lie,” Andrew Speaker, a 31-year-old Atlanta lawyer, said by telephone from the Denver hospital room where he remains in government-ordered isolation.
But in testimony to a Senate subcommittee, federal and local health officials said Speaker took an international flight two days earlier than planned after he had been told he had a drug-resistant form of TB and should not travel.
Fulton County health officials told Speaker, “No you should not travel,” said Dr. Steven R. Katkowsky, the health department’s director. “Was he ordered not to travel? The answer to that was no. The local health department does not have the authority to prohibit or order somebody not to travel.”
Speaker’s European wedding and honeymoon travel caused an international health scare. But Speaker told senators that in face-to-face meetings to discuss his treatment options days before he left, no doctors even wore masks.
“I was repeatedly told I was not contagious, that I was not a threat to anyone,” Speaker said.
His medical chart says he was told that “he was not highly contagious,” Katkowsky countered.”
http://www.11alive.com/news/article_news.aspx?storyid=98145&provider=top
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Letting Speaker back into the country wasn’t the only slip: He shouldn’t have been allowed out, either, said the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But after talking with local health officials on May 10, Speaker changed his flight reservations to leave the country two days earlier than originally planned, said CDC chief Dr. Julie Gerberding — a step ahead of doctors who, under Georgia law, couldn’t detain him until it was demonstrated that he was a danger.
“The whole issue of quarantine has been devoted to keeping people out. It is the first time have had to address keeping people in our country,” she said.
That was among a series of gaps Gerberding identified in the Senate subcommittee hearing in the nation’s public health security. Another: Once the CDC tracked Speaker down in Italy to tell him he had the worst TB form — a rare type resistant to most drugs — officials didn’t immediately ask Italian authorities to detain him, but asked him to voluntarily turn himself in.
“We gave the patient the benefit of the doubt, and in retrospect we made a mistake,” Gerberding said.
Instead, Speaker flew to Canada on May 24 — potentially exposing other passengers sitting near him on the plane — and then drove across the border into the U.S., despite a lookout alert issued to all border posts.