Editorial: TB flight raises questions

Monday, June 4, 2007 | 7:06 a.m.

The honeymoon is over for Andrew Speaker, who now resides in an isolation room at a Denver hospital. But his trip to Europe and back is not over for the Centers for Disease Control, the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, the Homeland Security Department and Congress.

Speaker is the 31-year-old personal injury lawyer from Atlanta whose rare and dangerous case of tuberculosis was discovered through updated tests only after he had left for Paris to be married and go on a honeymoon.

Georgia health officials contacted the CDC after discovering that Speaker had somehow contracted "extensively drug-resistant" tuberculosis, or XDR-TB. They claim Speaker was informed before his trip that he had drug-resistant TB and was advised not to travel, although at the time they did not realize it was the most extreme form. Speaker should have known, however, how dangerous this was. His new father-in-law is a microbiologist at the CDC who specializes in halting the spread of bacterial infections, including TB.

When the CDC finally made cell-phone contact with Speaker more than a week after he had left Atlanta, he was in Rome. The CDC's Dr. Martin Cetron told the Associated Press that Speaker was told not to get onto an airplane, that U.S. officials were working on how to get him home and that he could seek medical care through the U.S. embassy or Italian hospitals.

Instead, Speaker flew to Prague and on to Montreal. From there he drove home, passing with ease through a Border Patrol checkpoint.

From the start, this case has motivated the CDC and the Homeland Security Department to raise serious questions.

Should a person with TB or another contagious, possibly deadly, disease be restricted from flying?

Should the Italian health authorities have been contacted after the CDC traced Speaker to Rome, so that he could have been involuntarily isolated right then and there?

And the Homeland Security Department is asking how Speaker got through the Border Patrol checkpoint at Champlain, N.Y. Even though instructions quickly came through to hold Speaker after an inspector ran a check on his passport, the inspector waved him through. The inspector, who has been removed from duty, said he thought the instructions were "discretionary." How could that happen?

The questions need to be asked, as they bear heavily on controlling disease and ensuring national security. As for the border checkpoint, one point is obvious - inspectors need more training.

But the government does not need to get hysterical about quarantining as the result of this isolated incident. A sober, moderate approach here is needed to ensure that more of our rights and freedoms are not eroded.

We hope members of the House Homeland Security Committee, during a scheduled Wednesday hearing on this whole incident, bear that in mind.