Have tuberculosis, will travel
According to the Centers for Disease & Control (CDC), the man infected with a drug-resistant form of TB knew he was not supposed to travel overseas but did so anyway.
The man's excuse? He told an Atlanta newspaper that the health officials told he was infected but said they "preferred" he not travel.
He was placed on a no-fly list when the lab tests where confirmed positive for XDR TB. He was in Italy at the time. So he went around that barrier by flying into Montreal, Canada, and drove across the border in the states. Wow, what secure borders we have here!
The man said he sneaked back into the country because he feared "an unsuccessful treatment in Italy would have doomed him." Imagine if he had a more infectious disease like the one in the movie, The Last Stand?" We can thank him for bringing the plague back to the US.
Questions and an investigation into Homeland Security have begun in order to determine why this man was able to get through the Canadian border from Montreal.
Update 06/01/2007
This is very scary. Apparently, the TB person showed up on the border inspector's computer when he scanned his identification documents. The computer gave a warning to the inspector to stop him from entering the country and don protective gear, but he did not do so. Instead, he allowed him to pass through the checkpoint.
The inspector, who has been removed from border duty, explained that he was no doctor but that the infected man seemed perfectly healthy and that he thought the warning was merely "discretionary."
WTF?!?!? I do not want to make a big deal out of this, but such a warning from the computer system is a RED FLAG, so it is best to just detain the individual instead of just letting him pass through. Also, certain diseases can lie in an incubated state. Just imagine a person just infected with smallpox or ebola getting through our border just like that. They would look fine initially, but just enough time to get through the border before the disease breaks out.
Comments
Posted by: Thin Slicer
Posted on: June 1, 2007 02:38 PM
He has an infectious disease, but I believe he has been repeatedly tested and that it has been shown each time that the disease is not currently in an infectious, transmittable state. TB can reside dormant in an individual for years (5, 10, 20, etc.). To be transmitted, it should show up in scrapings from the areas involving his mouth and nose. These tests have been negative. His wife has not contracted the disease. Public health officials have said he was not a risk, but noted that they could not go on record to say that the risk was zero (wink, wink). Why would he believe that he was putting others at risk under these conditions?
I start with a very different premise than most--that Gerberding, head of the CDC, is a political animal. In her role as director, Gerberding has been a Bush suck-up who has played along with moves to twist and turn information to appease the religious right. Documentation showing that the CDC shifted their characterizations regarding the effectiveness of condoms from 1999 (pre-Bush) to 2002 (post-Bush) is easy to find (http://www.advocatesforyouth.org/PUBLICATIONS/iag/condom.htm). Some of these changes have occurred despite petitions from behavioral scientists and infectious disease specialists. She has sucked-up to Bush and the religious right with significant grant monies devoted to abstinence-based programs. And for what? Replication of results indicating that what we knew in the 80s and 90s still holds in the 00s--abstinence-based progams are no more effective than other programs, and can increase risks on a number of fronts.
What are the public health officials saying? They are saying that the risk of infection is "infinitesimally small" (e.g., Sanjay Gupta, CNN). Essentially, they told the young man then, and continue to say now to the public, that there is no real risk of infection--but as intellectuals and political animals, note that that they cannot assure us that the risk is 0. Indeed, there is also not a 0 probability of us all being wiped from the earth due an asteroid hit next week either.
Gerberding and the CDC had the opportunity to assure the young man of a flight from Italy to the US. They did the political calculus as good Bush appointees have learned. 'What if the public finds that we spent $23,000 to fly this guy? That wouldn't look good. Whose going to know if we abandon him in Italy, and if we do, why would anyone care enough to criticise us? And hey, no one can sue the US without the permission of the US?' And hence, the initial offer for a flight was withdrawn.
And now the blogs are full of the easy pick'ens. Oh--the fear. Oh my--the mental simulations and imaginations run amuck about the possibility of contagion. Oh--how he should have known better. And yeh, sure--he should have--I won't debate that point. Indeed, he should have realized that risk of tranmission was not 0, but was more like .000001, and he should have realized that this level of risk is not good enough for the public when a plane is involved.
BUT, the US should have worked with him as well. The cost of flying him from Italy to the US would have been cheaper than the cost of tracking down passengers and doing lots of tests, and would have certainly been less expensive than funding senseless, fear-based abstinence-based programs.
Want the low down on the primary vector of transmission whereby someone could have been infected here? I'll give it to ya straight: A snake comes out from luggage area of the plane and strikes the guy directly in the chest--piercing in the area where the bacillus infection is currently localized. And then good natured passengers take turns sucking the wound in an effort to remove the poison. Now--that would be worrisome.
In the end, this is simply a case of snakes on a plane. The most interesting thing about the case is that it points out that whether we're talking about water bottles on a plane, shoes on a plane, or disease on a plane, in a post 911 world, planes are the perfect instrument for capsulizing and transmitting fear.
Snakes on a plane, dude. It's just snakes on a plane.