A quarantined U.S. man who travelled to Europe and back while infected with a dangerous strain of tuberculosis apologized for his actions in an interview Friday.
Andrew Speaker, a 31-year-old lawyer from Atlanta, was identified Thursday as the man infected with what is called extensively drug resistant TB (XDR-TB) -- a multiple-drug resistant form of tuberculosis.
Speaker travelled to Paris on May 12. He then took Czech Airlines flight 0104 on May 24 from Prague to Montreal. From there, he drove into the United States.
Speaker told ABC's "Good Morning America'' that he, his doctors and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) all knew he had TB prior to his wedding and honeymoon trip to Europe last month.
But Speaker claims he didn't know until he was already in Rome that it was an extensively drug-resistant strain considered especially dangerous.
"I feel awful,'' he said from his hospital room in Denver. "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.
"I don't expect those people to ever forgive me. I just hope they understand that I truly never meant them any harm.''
Speaker said he was told that he wasn't contagious or a danger to anyone and that officials, while concerned about him flying, didn't forbid it.
Speaker's father, who is also a lawyer, even taped the conversation.
"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.'''
He said while in Europe with his new wife and her eight-year-old daughter the CDC contacted him and told him to turn himself into a clinic there and to not take another commercial flight.
He said he felt "abandoned" and that if he didn't get back to the specialized clinic in Denver that he would die.
"Before I left, I knew that it was made clear to me, that in order to fight this, I had one shot, and that was going to be in Denver,'' he said. If doctors in Europe tried to treat him and it went wrong, he said, "it's very real that I could have died there.''
Despite being put on a U.S. warning list, Speaker managed to fly to Montreal and then cross into the border at Champlain, N.Y. on May 24.
The border agent, who has since removed from duty, said he thought the warning alert -- which said to hold the traveller, put on a protective mask and alert health authorities -- was "discretionary."
On May 25, Speaker became the first infected person to be quarantined by the U.S. government since 1963.
CDC connection
In a bizarre twist, the man's father-in-law, Bob Cooksey, works for the CDC and happens to be a microbiologist specializing in the spread of the disease.
But in a statement issued Thursday, Cooksey said: "I wasn't involved in any decisions my son-in-law made regarding his travel." He also stressed: "My son-in-law's TB did not originate from myself, or the CDC's labs."
Meanwhile, all 28 passengers who sat near Speaker on the May 24th flight from Prague to Montreal have been identified, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada.
The 19 Canadians -- 14 from Quebec and five from Ontario -- and nine people of other nationalities were in the five rows immediately around Speaker.
Public health authorities say they have the contact information for the passengers so they can be tested.
"Contact information for the remaining 163 passengers has been shared with the appropriate public health authorities," the agency says in a press release.
Experts believe the odds of transmission are low, but the passengers could face months of anxiety as they wait for test results that will determine whether they're infected.
Speaker is now being treated at Denver's National Jewish Medical and Research Center with two antibiotics -- one oral, and the other taken intravenously.
Doctors have yet to determine how infectious he may be, but he is under strict quarantine in a room equipped with a ventilation system designed to prevent the escape of germs.
The head of the hospital's infectious disease division, Dr. Charles Daley, said the center may have treated two other patients with the same strain of TB since 2000 -- although the strain had not yet been identified.
Both patients survived and eventually released.
With files from The Associated Press
