WASHINGTON - US health officials and a tuberculosis-infected patient traded blame Wednesday during a Senate hearing to probe the global health scare sparked when the man traveled to Europe with a drug-resistant strain of the disease.
The patient, Andrew Speaker, insisted that doctors told him he was not contagious and posed no threat, while the head of the US Centers for Disease Control accused him of slipping out of the country last month against doctors` advice.
"I was told I was not contagious, not a threat to anyone," said Speaker, a 31-year-old lawyer who addressed the hearing via telephone from his hospital room in Denver, Colorado.
"I was told there was no need to sequester me," he said, explaining why he went ahead with plans to get married in Greece and spend his honeymoon in Italy, even though he had been diagnosed with a mildly drug resistant form of tuberculosis, or MDR-TB, on May 10.
"I didnt go running off or hide from people. Its a complete fallacy, its a lie."
However, CDC director Julie Gerberding testified that officials in the Fulton Country Health Department in Atlanta, Georgia, advised Speaker that same day not to go ahead with his European trip.
"Our understanding, from conversations with the county health officials, is that they orally advised the patient to forego his planned travel abroad," she said.
"In the days following this meeting," county health officials "attempted to serve the patient with written notice advising that the patient not travel, but the patient could not be located" because he had changed his schedule and departed two days earlier than planned, and on a different airline, she said.
Further complicating the matter, the CDC was faced with an unusual situation when it was forced to track down Speaker`s location on May 22, once health officials discovered that his disease was the extensively drug resistant strain, or XDR-TB.
US health officials found him in Rome and by telephone on May 22 and 23 "informed him of his XDR-TB diagnosis, explained the severity of the disease, instructed him to terminate all travel," Gerberding said.
But rather than check into an Italian hospital to be put in an isolation ward, Speaker and his wife flew to Montreal in Canada via Prague and drove across the border into the United States.
At that point, border officials failed to apprehend Speaker despite an advisory sent out within Customs and Border Protection that he be detained upon re-entry into the United States.
Eventually, on May 25, federal health officials reached Speaker on his mobile phone and ordered him to report to a New York City hospital for isolation and evaluation, which he did.
"Normally when a patient has tuberculosis, he or she voluntarily complies with recommended treatment and recommendations to ensure they don`t put themselves in situations where they could potentially expose others to a serious health threat," Gerberding said.
"We gave the patient the benefit of the doubt and in retrospect we made a mistake."
Asked by Senator Tom Harkin why Speaker wasn`t prevented from traveling in the first place, district health director of the Fulton County Health Department Steven Katkowsky said: "We found ourselves in a `Catch-22.`"
"Unfortunately, the way a lot of laws are written, we can`t take action until a violation has occurred," Katkowsky said.
"No one said he shouldn`t do this?" Harkin asked.
"He was told he was not highly contagious," Katkowsky said.
06/06/2007 19:34 GMT