CBS News: Andrew Harley Speaker Identified as Extreme TB Carrier
by John Little on 31/05/2007So much for HIPAA. According to press reports he’s a personal injury lawyer whose father-in-law works for the CDC.
A tuberculosis patient under the first federal quarantine since 1963 was taken Thursday to National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver, which specializes in respiratory disorders, officials said.
CBS News has learned the man with the extreme form of tuberculosis is Andrew Harley Speaker, a 31-year-old lawyer from Atlanta. A medical official in Atlanta also confirmed the name on condition of anonymity.
In an odd twist, Speaker’s father-in-law works as a microbiologist at a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention laboratory that studies tuberculosis and other bacterial infections.
Bob Cooksey said he gave his son-in-law “fatherly advice” when he learned he had contracted the disease.
They say Andrew could be confined to his room for several weeks. I think he’ll find that life has changed once he’s allowed to roam freely. People aren’t happy with the seemingly selfish choices he made – his profession isn’t helping matters. The jokes have already started:
What do you call a personal injury lawyer with a rare and dangerous form of tuberculosis? A good start.
Now how long do you think it will be until this guy and his family are on Oprah?
Update:
Diane Sawyer got to him first. He’s apologizing and claims to have a reasonable explanation:
Andrew Speaker has asked for forgiveness from the airline passengers he exposed to a rare strain of tuberculosis, and told ABC’s Diane Sawyer in an exclusive interview that he has a tape recording of a meeting with health officials that he claims will confirm his view that it was all right to travel in his condition.
“He says he wants everyone to know how he made the decision, why he felt so strongly that it was not endangering anybody else and [is] also asking forgiveness of those onboard who are now having to be tested,” Sawyer said after spending an hour with the TB patient and his wife, Sarah Speaker, at the National Jewish Research Center in Denver, where he is currently in isolation
Bloggers React:
Michelle Malkin
He is Andrew Harley Speaker–and what a selfish, reckless man he is.
Wizbang!
He’s educated enough to have known better than to fly on an airplane when he was infected with tuberculosis. You do not need to be a doctor to know you don’t put yourself in an enclosed space with hundreds of other unsuspecting people for hours at a time when you have an infectious airborne disease.
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