Lawmakers are beginning to ask the obvious question: Why was a man identified as having a strongly drug-resistant form of tuberculosis allowed to fly on an international commercial flight and cross the border into the United States even after his passport had been flagged? Concerns about drug-resistant TB have been circulating for years, and you’d think we might have learned our lesson about allowing flagged travelers into the United States after 9/11. If that’s not bad enough, the infected man, Andrew Speaker, has told the press that the Centers for Disease Control stonewalled his requests to provide him with non-commercial transportation from Europe to the Denver hospital that, they had informed him, was the only place that could to handle the virulent strain of TB. That treatment came despite the fact that his wife’s father works at the CDC. The U.S. government is going to have to get its act together, because drug resistant illnesses are on the rise and who knows what new viruses climate change will unleash.
