CDC: Passengers who flew with tuberculosis-infected man may be at risk
12:55 p.m. Wednesday, May 30, 2007
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Doctors say the patient was already overseas by the time tests confirmed he was suffering from the dangerous drug resistant strain of tuberculosis.
"If we had been aware that travel was imminent, we may have been able to act," said Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "I think we were surprised that the patient had left the country."
They're now scrambling the world, trying to find passengers who may have been exposed.
On May 12, the man and his fiance left Atlanta on an Air-France 385, to Paris for their wedding in Greece and a honeymoon in Italy.
That honeymoon was interupted by the CDC who told the man he needed to turn himself in to Italian health authorities.
The man ignored the request, telling the Atlanta Journal Constitution"I thought to myself, 'you're nuts.' I wasn't going to do that."
Instead, he returned to the U.S. for treatment, flying Czech Air flight 0104 from Prague to Montreal to avoid having his passport flagged. He then drove into the country and met up with very concerned doctors from the CDC.
"This particular form of disease may not be that contagious in terms of how easily it spreads form one person to another. But it will spread," said Columbia University Dr. Erwin Redlener. "The real problem is that as many as 50 percent of the people who contract this particular illness - this multi-drug resistant tuberculosis it will not survive."
Physicians say that tuberculosis is most commonly spread through air droplets, when a person infected with TB coughs, talks or sneezes. Usually, it takes repeated exposure to become infected, but health officials still say that passengers who were seated closest to the infected traveler need to be tested now.
"The people at greatest risk on the airplane are the people who sat in close proximity to him - in the same row, in a couple of rows forward and a couple of rows back," said Vanderbilt Medical Center Dr. William Schaffner.
The man is being kept in isolation at the Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta.
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