When Atlanta attorney Andrew Speaker learned he had tuberculosis, he suspected he might have been infected on a 2006 trip to Vietnam and took steps to urge those who had traveled with him to get tested, a trip leader said today.
“He wasn’t uncaring and cavalier,” said Warren Williams of Speaker. “He said, ‘You and the other team members need to be tested.'”
Speaker, 31 – now quarantined with a dangerous strain of drug-resistant tuberculosis and undergoing treatment at a Denver hospital – apologized on national television this morning for taking commercial flights while infected, insisting he did not mean to put fellow passengers at risk.
Williams was a leader of a Rotary International-sponsored “Group Study Exchange” team of young Atlanta professionals, including Speaker, that toured Vietnam for 41/2 weeks in the spring of 2006.
Vietnam is among 25 nations with the highest rates of TB infection, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
When Speaker learned of his TB infection, he recalled his visit to a hospital in Ho Chi Minh City and wondered if that’s where he contracted the disease, Williams said.
“In March, he called and asked for the name of the hospital we were in,” said Williams, interviewed by phone today from Atlanta.
Speaker also asked Williams to tell three other members of the team that toured Vietnam that they needed to get tested for TB.
Williams said Speaker told him that he had been advised he wasn’t contagious, Williams said.
Heeding Speaker’s warning, Williams was tested for TB at the time of Speaker’s call. The test was negative.
But after the furor in recent days about Speaker’s condition, Williams decided to take the test again and urged other team members to do the same. So far no tests have been positive for TB, he said.
According to Dr. Charles L. Daley at Denver’s National Jewish Medical and Research Center, where Speaker is being treated, Speaker told doctors on Thursday that he believes he got TB during a trip to Asia.
The Rotary Foundation created the Group Study Exchange program so that young professionals between the ages of 25 and 40 can act as ambassadors for their country and learn how their peers in other countries work, Williams said.
Speaker was among 13 young professionals who applied for the program last year, said Williams, who served two Army tours of duty in Vietnam in the 1960s and has since returned to the southeast Asian country more than 20 times.
“His background as an attorney was less important (in his selection) than his personality,” Speaker said. “He sparkled all the time.”
When Speaker and the others arrived in Vietnam, they traversed the country from small villages to Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, Williams said. Speaker was very energetic and inquisitive, he said.
“He was eager to learn a lot about the culture,” Williams said. Speaker met a Vietnamese attorney and talked to him about what it was like to practice law, he said.
While the group stayed in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, they spent a day at a hospital to see children who received operations to correct cleft palates paid for by an Australian Rotary Club, Williams said.
Williams said he did not know whether other patients in the hospital had TB. He can’t recall the name of the facility.
There were many other places where the team came into contact with hundreds of people who may have been infected with TB, Williams said said.
“We weren’t holed up in a building getting a bunch of briefings,” Williams said. “We were out and about making our observations. We were in open-air markets and museums. They’re always crowded; you’re always jostling for passage.”
Staff writer Kirk Mitchell can be reached at 303-954-1206 or kmitchell@denverpost.com.
