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Mycobacterium tuberculosis

An increasingly sordid story involving bureaucratic incompetence and a sort of personal selfishness that is beyond comprehension continues to unfold. A still publicly unidentified man is told he has tuberculosis, is advised not to fly, but does so anyway. And not just one flight–seven flights this freak takes, two 8-hour plus international flights and five smaller local flights in Europe.

He explains he didn’t know it was the drug-resistant sort. As though it’s okay to expose people to just ‘regular’ TB. Keep in mind, with as many flights as this man took he exposed babies, children, pregnant women and seniors to tuberculosis. Then, he and his new bride decided to sneak back into the US when he was put on a no-fly list and his passport was flagged, and still manages to fly into Canada and drive back into the U.S. That 8-hour plus flight was taken when he knew he had the seriously resistant and deadly strain.

The deadly narcissism of this is mind-boggling and it should absolutely be considered a criminal act.

Groom With TB Under Federal Quarantine

A man with a form of tuberculosis so dangerous he is under the first U.S. government-ordered quarantine since 1963 had health officials around the world scrambling Wednesday to find passengers who sat near him on two trans-Atlantic flights.

The man told a newspaper he took the first flight from Atlanta to Europe for his wedding, then the second flight home because he feared he might die without treatment in the U.S.

So he could get what he thought would be better treatment, he decided putting untold hundreds of others at risk, many who, if infected would undoubtedly die from such a virulent strain, did so anyway. So save his own self-obsessed ass.

Health officials said the man had been advised not to fly and knew he could expose others when he boarded the jets from Atlanta to Paris, and later from Prague to Montreal.

The man, however, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that doctors didn’t order him not to fly and only suggested he put off his long-planned wedding in Greece. He knew he had a form of tuberculosis and that it was resistant to first-line drugs, but he didn’t realize it could be so dangerous, he said.

“We headed off to Greece thinking everything’s fine,” said the man, who declined to be identified because of the stigma attached to his diagnosis.

The stigma associated with the diagnosis? How about the stigma of exposing hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of innocent people to something that has only a 30% cure rate? Still, astoundingly, thinking only of himself.

The man told the Journal-Constitution he was in Rome during his honeymoon when the CDC notified him of the new tests and told him to turn himself in to Italian authorities to be isolated and be treated. The CDC told him he couldn’t fly aboard commercial airliners.

“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 said.

He told the newspaper he and his wife decided to sneak back into the U.S. through Canada. He said he voluntarily went to a New York hospital, then was flown by the CDC to Atlanta.

He is not facing prosecution, health officials said.

This freak made a direct, conscious decision to which he has admitted that an isolation order was just too inconvenient, he would expose other people in order to get himself home. All this after having been told at the beginning that he shouldn’t travel in the first place. Why he is not facing prosecution is inconceivable.

But this, this, is my favorite part–a statement from this man about that fact that there is an armed guard outside of his isolation room at the hospital. An absolutely perfect highlight of the scourge of Malignant Narcissism:

“I’m a very well-educated, successful, intelligent person,” he told the paper. “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.”

My God. Yeah, smart except for that whole confinement thing in Italy. And that flying thing internationally anyway after being told he had TB. And then all those little flights he took in Europe. And then sneaking back into the U.S. And having to wait in all those airline terminals. And eating in who knows how many restaurants, a wedding, kissing people. And exposing his new wife to it.

“Well-educated…intelligent.” For crying out loud.

New reports indicate this man was diagnosed in January. And yet the Feds won’t release his name citing his right to privacy. What about the right of people who were around him to know they may be infected with something that, with its resistant strain, may be more immediately deadly than AIDS?

How the CDC characterize this extremely deadly, resistant form of TB?

Health officials worry about “multidrug-resistant” TB, which can withstand the mainline antibiotics isoniazid and rifampin. The man was infected with something even worse – “extensively drug-resistant” TB, also called XDR-TB, which resists many drugs used to treat the infection.

There have been 17 U.S. XDR-TB cases since 2000, according to CDC statistics.

Well, odds are they’ll have a lot more to worry about. This ridiculous situation is also a wake-up call when it comes to how our bloated bureaucracy would respond should there be a biological attack by terrorists. Incomprehensible damage could have been caused by one astoundingly selfish man. Imagine what a determined terrorist or two could do, infected with smallpox, taking multiple international and local flights.

This man was a known biological risk, his passport was flagged and he was on a no-fly list, yet he managed to get from Paris to Prague, then from Prague to Montreal. He then manages to slip into the country, New York specifically, undetected. All this when he was known to carry the newly deadly resistant form. Flying with ‘regular’ TB seemed to be no problem whatsoever for anyone.

What a wake-up call.

Related Links:

‘Virtually untreatable’ TB found

Extensively Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis (Xdr-Tb): The Facts

Microbe-WIki: Mycobacterium

Fox: Tuberculosis – Getting the Facts