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Brilliant!: How to Fly with (eXtreamly Drug Resistant) Tuberculosis

May 30, '07 11:41 AM
for everyone

HOWTO: Fly with Tuberculosis

Say you're infected with a highly drug-resistant form of a deadly contagious disease. Should you get on an international flight with a few hundred other people in the enclosed space of a plane, potentially infecting them? Even if physicians who have tested you recommend against such travel? Well sure, why not -- if the doctors didn't explicitly forbid you from traveling, or legally compel you not to travel, how bad can it be? Aside from coughing up blood and having your tissue necrotize to the consistency of soft, white cheese until you die, it's not such a big deal. An as-yet unidentified Georgia man with dual Russian-American citizenship was diagnosed with tuberculosis in early May, and health Rome, and things got a little more serious. officials advised him not to fly. But he'd already arranged for a wedding and honeymoon in Europe, so he went anyway. Then the Centers for Disease Control contacted him while he was in

To recap, the gentleman in question flew from Atlanta to Paris on May 12 aboard Air France. From there he went to Greece for his wedding, and then the CDC found him in Rome and informed him that not only was he infected with tuberculosis, but a particularly nasty strain of tuberculosis. Again he was urged not to fly, and again, he ignored the warnings:I

thought to myself: You're nuts. I wasn't going to do that. They told me I had been put on the no-fly list and my passport was flagged,

The man reasoned that though he could care less about infecting other people, he wasn't so foolish as to allow himself to be treated by Italian doctors. They're crazy! But he began to worry about the CDC stopping him at the airport, so he and his new wife hatched a daring, complex plan -- they flew from Prague to Montreal via Czech Air on May 24, then drove across the border into the United States. No problems!

Tuberculosis Man called the CDC, and they promptly flew him back to Atlanta and put him under the first federal quarantine since 1963. Astoundingly, T-Man finds this inappropriately demeaning:

I'm a very well-educated, successful, intelligent person. This is insane to me that I have an armed guard outside my door when I've cooperated with everything other than the whole solitary-confinement-in-Italy thing.

He's simply too high-class for quarantine, you hear? Even his deadly pathogens are well-educated, successful, and intelligent. Looks like he'll be spending some time in a Denver isolation chamber to contemplate his unfair lot in life. Maybe somebody else he infected will get the next cell over.

CDC quarantines air passenger with deadly tuberculosis strain [AP]
Man With Rare TB: I Sneaked Back Into U.S. [CBS]

-- Chris Mohney

Tags: brillitant!, pandemic, wtf!

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18 CommentsChronological Reverse Threaded

vdentata wrote on May 30, '07

Jesus.

jackfrost wrote on May 30, '07

Yeah, don't think he was involved. Course, maybe he was...

lenoredoll wrote on May 30, '07

Well-educated, successful, intelligent, and an arrogant asshole. Niice.

vdentata wrote on May 30, '07

Folks, I think we've got ourselves a new Patient Zero.

jackfrost wrote on May 30, '07, edited on May 30, '07

This coverage at CNN is a little more, um, revealing.

For instance: The man told the newspaper that a CDC staff member told him to turn himself into Italian health authorities where he would be put in isolation and given medical treatment. He said he sneaked back into the country because he feared "an unsuccessful treatment in Italy would have doomed him," the newspaper reported.

jackfrost wrote on May 30, '07

Hmmm, thought: If you were seated next to him and contract this, can you sue him for criminal assault? Attempted involuntary manslaughter charges?

lenoredoll wrote on May 30, '07

Only if you develop TB and you can prove you got it from the Atlanta man. You might even win if you can rally up some fear and imminent threat in the minds of the jury.

mivox wrote on May 30, '07

I heard on the radio this morning that it's not actually very contagious, so everyone's probably panicking over nothing.

We'll see, I suppose.

mildlot wrote on May 30, '07

I've already had tuberculosis, so I'm fuckin' immune.

Let 'em all die, I say! More cupcakes 'n' Kool-Aid for me!

heiko wrote on May 31, '07

ohh... doooooooooom!

jackfrost wrote on May 31, '07

Here is a photo of the dumbass:

Updated news:
The man infected with potentially fatal tuberculosis is receiving treatment at a Denver, Colorado, hospital as federal health officials continue to track down airline passengers who may have been exposed to the illness.

The man has been identified by multiple medical and law enforcement sources as Andrew Speaker, 31, a lawyer from Atlanta, Georgia. Hospital officials have not disclosed his name.

Speaker's father-in-law works for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, an agency spokesman said Thursday.

The father-in-law, Robert C. Cooksey, is a microbiologist who has conducted research on tuberculosis for the National Center for Infectious Diseases, according to a CDC biography posted on the agency's Web site.

vdentata wrote on May 31, '07

Oh, jesus. So now it makes sense that this guy and his wife hatched this plot...

mildlot wrote on May 31, '07

Shiiiiiiiiiit -- I'm not for conspiracy theories as a rule, but this is fishier than all heck.

mivox wrote on May 31, '07, edited on May 31, '07

Except that he's probably not that contagious in the first place ... if this is a conspiracy for anything, it's a plot for stirring up baseless hysteria.

One of the articles I read (linked from here, somewhere) pointed out that even people who live in the same household with tuberculosis patients only have a 30% infection rate ...