TB patient Speaker questions CDC policy on isolation

Published 10:36 am Friday, July 6, 2007

ATLANTA (AP) — Tuberculosis patient Andrew Speaker said Thursday that he would have cancelled his wedding trip to Europe and gone into isolation if the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had told him to after he was diagnosed with a dangerous form of the disease in early May.

“There’s still this perception that I was acting irresponsibly and the CDC didn’t do anything wrong,” Speaker said in an evening telephone interview from a Colorado hospital, where he has been under treatment for a month.

His statement to The Associated Press was the latest is a series of he said/they said exchanges with government health officials through the media.

Officials from the CDC and the National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver said Tuesday that recent tests have shown that the Atlanta lawyer has a more treatable, multidrug-resistant strain of TB, rather than the extensively drug resistant form they said he had in late May when they placed him under the first federal quarantine order since 1963.

Dr. Mitchell Cohen of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said at the Colorado news conference that the public health response should be the same to both drug resistant forms, whether it was MDR-TB or XDR-TB.

If an MDR diagnosis calls for a patient to be isolated in those cases, Speaker asked, why wasn’t he?

“If they are going to claim that this is standard procedure, that they are going to treat me this way regardless, well, they didn’t,” he said.

“There should be a process on how to handle it. If I should be isolated, I’m fine with that, if they told me,” Speaker said. “You don’t go out after the fact and blame the patient for what you told them.”

Efforts to reach two CDC spokesmen were unsuccessful Thursday night.

In late May, CDC officials noted the XDR diagnosis was an important factor in their deciding to issue the federal quarantine order. But they also said Speaker’s repeated non-compliance was a major factor. They said that, in essence, they decided they couldn’t trust him to stay off commercial flights or follow their other directives.

Speaker said he was told in a meeting with Fulton County officials on May 10 that he was not contagious, and that he was never ordered not to travel. Health authorities say he was told that he was not “highly” contagious and that they advised him not to fly to Europe.

Thursday night, he accused the CDC of trying to distort the timeline to cover up the fact that he was not ordered into isolation before May 10. He noted that the agency’s own Web site does not mention its own test finding of MDR-TB a day or two earlier.

“On their own timeline, they simply failed to put their own test,” he said.

He insisted that he had followed instructions.

“When I was in Rome, and they told me I had XDR and that I had to cancel my trip, I cancelled my trip,” he said.

He also acknowledged that he did not abide by CDC officials’ wishes to turn himself in to health authorities in Italy, but instead took a flight back to North America. He has said in the past that he feared for his life at that point and wanted to make his way back to get to the Denver hospital.

Speaker said he hopes his case will call attention to tuberculosis.

“Two million people die each year from something that we can try to cure,” he said.

The reason both MDR-TB and XDR-TB are so hard to cure, he said, is their rarity in developed countries.

“The truth is, it’s no longer profitable to make any new drugs,” he said.