Personal About Politics: Andrew Speaker: Reckless Endangerment to the World

I find the odyssey of Andrew Speaker, the 31- year -old attorney with a multi- drug resistant tuberculosis (TB), disturbing on many levels.

Andrew Speaker is an Atlanta personal injury lawyer, who knowingly left the country to get married after being diagnosed with TB. Mind you, this is not an illiterate, illegal immigrant crossing the border by swimming the Rio Grande, having no clue that he has a dangerous disease, no, this is a well- educated man, who knew exactly what he was doing.

Speaker was told on May 10 that he had a drug-resistant form of TB, and was strongly urged by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) not to travel. So, what did he do? He bumped up his travel plans and left two days earlier. He selfishly and recklessly endangered his family, friends and countless others who flew on the planes with him. Speaker didn’t make just one flight, he made multiple flights. First from Atlanta (home of the CDC) to Paris, from Paris to Athens, on to a Greek Island, then back to Athens, and then on to Rome. All in the space of 11 days.

It was at Rome that he was finally tracked down by the CDC and told not to fly on a commercial plane, but instead report immediately to an Italian hospital until safe passage could be arranged for him. So, what did Speaker do? He and his new wife quickly left the country taking a circuitous route via Prague and Montreal to avoid detection. In Montreal, they rented a car to cross the border, knowing they would be looking for then at airports.

Now this is where our billions ($5 billion spent in 2004 alone) of tax dollars are being spent on Homeland Security every year, come into play. An alert had been attached to Speaker’s passport and all border crossings notified that he should be detained. A Homeland Security guard detained him briefly and then let him pass through, because as the border guard said, “He didn’t look sick.”

Is he joking? He didn’t look sick? How were they trained in Homeland Security School to determine if someone “looks” sick? Were they trained to read alerts that say “detain this person”? Apparently not.

Just when you thought this story could not get more ludicrous, Speaker’s father-in-law, Robert Cooksey, is a TB researcher at the CDC in Atlanta.

You can’t make this stuff up, folks.

Why didn’t Cooksey impress upon his future son-in-law the seriousness of his disease and suggest a nice little wedding in Atlanta, with a honeymoon in Greece when you are better? Didn’t want to disappoint his daughter?

Why is Speaker’s father, also an attorney, downplaying the seriousness of what his son has done, by saying on WSB-TV, ‘The way he’s been shown and spoken about on TV, it’s like a terrorist traveling around the world escaping authorities. It’s been blown out of proportion immensely.’ ? Did he assure his son that as lawyers, they could handle any ramifications that occurred?

How about international ramifications? What about all the passengers he flew with that could have been infected, and in turn infected others? It has been stated that his strain of TB has been proven to be of low communicability, which means it’s very unlikely that anyone else was infected by Speaker. However, someone may have been infected, after all, Speaker had to catch if from someone, somewhere.

What if it had been highly contagious? By ignoring warnings, staying one jump ahead of authorities and the law by flying to multiple countries, Speaker could have created a worldwide pandemic of unimaginable proportions.

Also, by his actions, he has broadcast to the entire world, including those who wish harm to America, that instead of blowing yourself up, you can infect yourself with a deadly and highly contagious disease, crisscross into counties and kill thousands, perhaps millions. Germs are just as lethal, perhaps more so, than guns and bombs.

I’m not accepting his apology on Good Morning America: “"I'm very sorry for any grief or pain that I have caused anyone." 

I think Andrew Speaker should be in jail and tried for reckless endangerment to the world. Let’s see if his dad can defend him against that.


 
“Thus, from our point of view, genital sores, diarrhea, and coughing are ‘symptoms of disease.’. From a germ’s point of view, they’re clever evolutionary strategies to broadcast the germ. That’s why it’s in the germ’s interest to ‘make us sick.’ But why should a germ evolve the apparently self-defeating strategy of killing its host?

From the germ’s perspective, that’s just an unintended by-product (fat consolation to us!) of host symptoms promoting efficient transmission of microbes.

Provided that each victim thereby infects on the average more than one new victim, the bacterium will spread, even though the first host happens to die.”

Jared Diamond. “Guns, Germs, and Steel. The Fate of Human Societies.”

 


Cheri Cabot, Politics Correspondent
Cheri’s column, “Personal About Politics”, published every Tuesday, will reflect on how the life of a 57 year-old, middle class woman is affected by politics, policy and the current state of the nation - a look at the personal aspects of politics. The articles will be posted to Politics.gather.com as part of Gather Essentials.

Cheri is a single teacher and writer, living in Southern California.  She has two grown children, one in Iowa and one at Columbia University, and is the proud grandmother of two. Cheri is also a purveyor of fine coffee, warm chatter and dry wit.

You can find all of Cheri’s columns on Personal About Politics at www.ccabot.gather.com.  Keep up with Cheri’s other postings and Gather activity by joining her Gather network at www.ccabot.gather.com, and select the orange “Connect” button on the left-hand side of the page.

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