He caused an international health scare by flying to his wedding in Greece and later to Canada while infected with extremely drug-resistant (XDR) tuberculosis. Now Andrew Speaker, a 31-year-old American, says his doctors told him “repeatedly” that he was not contagious – even to his new wife. “I really believed I wasn’t putting people at risk because that was what I was told,” Speaker told ABC News.
He is smear-negative, meaning no bacilli are visible in his sputum. Such people can transmit TB, but rarely do if they are symptom-free, like Speaker. “Someone not coughing, with a low burden of bacteria, should have a low index of contagion,” says Marcel Behr of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, but this has never been directly measured.
Speaker says the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, knew of his wedding plans: ironically, the bride’s father is a CDC TB researcher. Days after the wedding, when the CDC discovered that Speaker’s TB was XDR, staff called him on honeymoon in Rome and told him they were “not comfortable” with him taking commercial flights. Speaker had already been told he would die without specialist treatment in Denver, Colorado, but the CDC had banned him from US flights, so he flew to Canada and drove into the US. The CDC then flew him to Denver. He was in hospital there as 91av went to press.
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The CDC said: “On the basis of the patient’s clinical and laboratory status… this patient was considered potentially infectious at the time of his airline travel.”
