Father-In-Law Is CDC Microbiologist
The man who traveled overseas from
Atlanta, GA last month -- despite a doctor's warning that he had
tuberculosis -- has a name. He is attorney Andrew Speaker, 31,
and he's currently receiving treatment at a specialized medical
center in Denver, CO.
And judging from media reports, he allegedly should have
known better.
As Aero-News reported,
Speaker boarded a commercial jet out of Atlanta on May 14 for a
transatlantic trip to his wedding, another for his honeymoon. He
flew on seven different flights on three different airlines --
including flights from Rome to Prague, and on to Montreal, after
doctors informed him he carried a particularly nasty, extremely
drug-resistant form of the disease, known as XDR-TB.
Speaker maintains doctors advised him against traveling before
he left with his fiance to get married in Italy, though they didn't
forbid him from doing so. Though officials with the Center for
Disease Control contacted him in Rome and told him to cancel his
commercial tickets and wait to be picked up by authorities, Speaker
went ahead and flew home... for what he called a fear of being
treated outside the US. He entered the US from Canada through a
border checkpoint.
"I'm a very well-educated, successful, intelligent person,"
Speaker told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution this week, speaking
from his room in an area hospital, detained under the first federal
medical quarantine issued since 1963. "This is insane to me that I
have an armed guard outside my door when I have cooperated with
everything other than the whole solitary-confinement-in-Italy
thing."
In yet another bizarre twist to
this surreal tale, comes word Speaker's new father-in-law is
himself a doctor, with an extensive knowledge of communicable
diseases like TB. Bob Cooksey is a microbiologist with the CDC, who
specializes in tuberculosis and similar bacterial diseases.
Though he wouldn't say whether he reported his son-in-law to the
authorities, as some have speculated (the CDC also won't comment
how it learned about Speaker's predicament), Cooksey did say
he gave Speaker some "fatherly advice" when he learned his
daughter's soon-to-be husband had the disease.
Passengers onboard some of the same flights as
Speaker believe it was "insane" for a "well-educated, successful,
intelligent person" to take the risks he did, potentially exposing
those around him to a deadly disease.
"It's still very scary," University of South Carolina-Aiken
student Laney Wiggins, one of over two dozens students at the
school who were onboard the same flight as Speaker, told The
Associated Press. "That is an outrageous number of people that he
was very reckless with their health. It's not fair. It's
selfish."
In a Friday interview with ABC, Speaker apologized to passengers
now having to get skin tests, to see if they were infected. "I'm
very sorry for any grief or pain that I have caused anyone."
For the moment, it appears no other people were infected. Gwen
Huitt, a doctor at Denver's National Jewish Medical and Research
Center, told WebMD Speaker's chest x-rays and CT scans revealed "no
surprises," and that his TB shows a low likelihood of easily
spreading to others.
Speaker himself is "doing very well," Dr. Huitt added, saying
the man has started an aggressive drug regiment, and is even using
an exercise bike in his negative air-pressure isolation room. For
the moment, he is asymptomatic.