Man with rare tuberculosis tells his tale

This stuff is just going to get worse...

From the International Herald Tribune:

A man with a form of tuberculosis so dangerous that he is under the first U.S. government-ordered quarantine since 1963 has described how he took one trans-Atlantic flight for his wedding and honeymoon and another because he feared for his life.

Hundreds of health officials around the world are now scrambling to track down passengers who were seated near the man, said Julie Gerberding, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, on Wednesday.

"There are two aspects to this," Gerberding said. "One is, is the patient himself highly infectious? Fortunately, in this case, he's probably not. But the other piece is this bacteria is a very deadly bacteria. We just have to err on the side of caution."

Health officials said that the man had been advised not to fly and that he 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 had not ordered him not to fly and had only suggested that he put off his long-planned wedding in Greece.

He knew that he had a form of tuberculosis and that it was resistant to first-line drugs, but he did not 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.

He flew to Paris on May 12 aboard Air France Flight 385. While he was in Europe, the health authorities reached him with the news that further tests had revealed his TB to be a rare, "extensively drug-resistant" form, far more dangerous than he knew. They ordered him into isolation, saying he should turn himself over to Italian officials.

Instead, the man flew from Prague to Montreal on May 24 aboard Czech Air Flight 0104, then drove into the United States. He told the newspaper he was afraid that if he did not get back to the United States he would not get the treatment he needed to survive.

He is now at Grady Memorial Hospital, in Atlanta, in respiratory isolation.

With the free travel, immigration, both legal and illegal, Diseases that have been wiped out in the USA are reappearing. This seems like a new form of resistant TB, but illegal aliens from south of the border have already brought TB and resistant TB back to the U.S. along with other diseases and bed bugs.

Now to get to another point his story points out. If our health care system is so bad and Europe.s socialized medicine is so good, why did he go to such great lengths to get back to the USA? Well, in his own words: " he was afraid that if he did not get back to the United States he would not get the treatment he needed to survive." Yup, and every Dem running for President wants to FIX our failing health system, careful folks...

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