Andrew Speaker, the globe-trotting man with rare, drug-resistant tuberculosis, will have surgery to remove infected and damaged tissue in his right lung, his doctors said.
The surgery probably will take place next month, according to doctors at National Jewish Medical and Research Center, where the 31-year-old Atlanta lawyer is being treated in isolation.
Speaker has been taking several antibiotics since soon after his arrival at National Jewish on May 29.
Doctors treating Speaker were unanimous in deciding to operate and called him an excellent candidate for surgery.
“The infected area of his lung is relatively small and well-contained,” said Dr. Charles Daley, head of the hospital’s infectious-disease division and one of Speaker’s team of physicians.
“He is also young and otherwise healthy,” Daley said.
The surgery will be conducted at the University of Colorado Hospital at the Anschutz Medical Campus.
The surgery will involve removing the right upper lobe of Speaker’s lung, which contains the damaged tissue.
The surgeon, Dr. John Mitchell, said he plans to use a minimally invasive technique.
The hospital is one of a handful of places that do surgery on tuberculosis patients.
While removing diseased lung tissue was standard procedure before the advent of antibiotics, it fell out of favor for decades.
But when strains of TB that couldn’t be cured by antibiotics began to emerge in the 1980s, surgery once again became part of the treatment in especially difficult cases.
“We looked at what they had done with drugs alone and thought they could do better with drugs and surgery,” said Dr. Marvin Pomerantz, a University of Colorado Hospital surgeon who, in partnership with National Jewish, pioneered the treatment.
“And indeed patients we operated on did better,” Pomerantz said.
Doctors probably will wait several more weeks before doing the surgery in order to see how well the antibiotic cocktail is working on Speaker.
Speaker was honeymooning in Europe when doctors learned that his infection was extensively drug resistant, or XDR, TB.
After being asked not to travel on a commercial flight, Speaker and his bride flew from Rome to Prague, Czech Republic, then to Montreal. They then drove across the Canadian border into New York. At that time, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued its first isolation order in 43 years to prevent Speaker from further travel.
Staff writer Karen Augé can be reached at 303-954-1733 or kauge@denverpost.com.
