The man with a highly drug-resistant strain of TB, who decamped to Italy aboard a commercial airline for his honeymoon against the CDC's advisement, and then eluded authorities when told that he would be quarantined abroad and banned from returning to the U.S., before smuggling himself back to the states via Canada, is sorry for putting everyone out. Andrew Speaker, who was initially not named by the press because of the stigma associated with being a TB-infected person, is a lawyer from Atlanta. The stigma of clearing one's name from being a total public pariah now outweighs being a deadly disease carrier.
It's not likely that Speaker is highly contagious, but his interactions with the Centers for Disease Control became highly contentious after the the man left the country by travelling on a commercial airline––a confined space with recycled air that is infamous for transmitting communicable diseases. The patient, now confined for treatment in Colorado, wanted to go to Greece for his honeymoon. His new father-in-law actually works for the CDC and specializes in . . . infectious diseases like TB!
Speaker actually has audiotape of doctors saying that he wasn't explicitly forbidden from travelling, which we find absolutely fascinating, because we've never thought to audiotape our doctors visits. Frankly, we find the confluence of all these details highly entertaining.
