31-year-old lawyer apologizes; no others found to be infected, CDC reports

DENVER - The Atlanta lawyer quarantined with a dangerous strain of tuberculosis apologized to fellow airline passengers in an interview aired Friday, and insisted he was told before he set out for his wedding in Europe that he was no danger to anyone.
“I’ve lived in this state of constant fear and anxiety and exhaustion for a week now, and to think that someone else is now feeling that, I wouldn’t want anyone to feel that way. It’s awful,” Andrew Speaker, speaking through a face mask, told ABC’s “Good Morning America” from his hospital room in Denver.
Meanwhile, questions arose as to whether the wedding even took place. The mayor of the island of Santorini in Greece, Angelos Rousso, told The Associated Press: “There was no wedding. They came for a marriage but they did not have the required papers.” He said the couple stayed in a hotel for three days and then left.

In Denver, Speaker’s doctors said that he could be in the hospital for up to two months, and that if antibiotics fail to knock out the extremely drug-resistant infection, he may have to undergo surgery to remove infected lung tissue, about the size of a tennis ball.
Surgery to remove pieces of the lung was more common before the advent of sophisticated drugs in the 1960s. But it is coming back as a treatment because of the development of strains resistant to those drugs.
Speaker is the first infected person quarantined by the U.S. government since 1963. In the TV interview, Speaker, wearing street clothes, repeatedly apologized to the dozens of airline passengers and crew members now anxiously awaiting the results of their TB tests.

“I don’t expect for people to ever forgive me. I just hope that they understand that I truly never meant to put them in harm,” he said, his voice cracking.
The CDC expects to lift the isolation order on Speaker within a few days. He will become the responsibility of Denver health authorities who will determine he is not planning to flee, NBC News has learned.
Contacting passengersHealth officials have contacted 74 of the 310 U.S. citizens who were on the May 12 Air France flight that Speaker and his fiancee took to Paris, the CDC said. That count includes all 26 who sat in the five-row area around Speaker — the ones considered at greatest risk.
None is exhibiting symptoms, CDC officials said.
Speaker, 31, said he, his doctors and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention all knew he had TB that was resistant to some drugs before he flew to Europe for his wedding and honeymoon last month. But he said he was advised at the time by Fulton County, Ga., health authorities that he was not contagious or a danger to anyone.
Officials told him they would prefer he didn’t fly, but no one ordered him not to, he said. Speaker said his father, also a lawyer, taped that meeting.

“My father said, ‘OK, now are you saying, prefer not to go on the trip because he’s a risk to anybody, or are you simply saying that to cover yourself?’ And they said, ‘We have to tell you that to cover ourself, but he’s not a risk,”’ Speaker said.
“I never would have put my family at risk, and my daughter at risk. I repeatedly asked my doctors, ’Is my family at risk? Is anybody at risk of this?”’ he said.
‘Abandoned’Speaker was in Europe when he learned tests showed he had not just TB, but an especially dangerous, extensively drug-resistant strain.
“He was told in no uncertain terms not to take a flight back,” said Dr. Martin Cetron, director of the CDC’s division of global migration and quarantine. But there were no legal orders preventing his travel, Cetron said.

Speaker said he felt as if the CDC had suddenly “abandoned him.” He said he believed if he didn’t get to the specialized clinic in Denver, he would die.
“In hindsight, maybe it wasn’t the best decision, but I did ask if it was voluntary. And in my mind, I thought that if I went there, if I waited until they showed up, that meant I was going to die,” Speaker said.
Speaker’s new father-in-law, Robert C. Cooksey, is a CDC microbiologist whose specialty is TB and other bacteria. He said neither he nor his CDC lab was the source of Speaker’s TB.
Cooksey said he provided only “fatherly advice” to Speaker about traveling with the illness.
“In my capacity as his future father-in-law, I told him to take care of my daughter,” Cooksey told the AP.

Cooksey may have been involved in preparing one of the lab tests that determined what type of TB Speaker had contracted and helped track down the honeymooning couple, CDC director Dr. Julie Gerberding said. But she declined to provide more details on Cooksey’s involvement in the case, and would not comment on the propriety of his actions.
“The father-in-law’s role was limited to what was expected of a father-in-law,” Gerberding said.
Doctors hope to determine where Speaker contracted the disease, which has been found around the world and exists in pockets in Russia and Asia. The tuberculosis was discovered when Speaker had a chest X-ray in January for a rib injury, doctors said.