As it turns out, famed tuberculosis patient Andrew Speaker isn’t as sick as we were led to believe.
The strain of the disease carried by the Atlanta lawyer has a 70 percent to 95 percent cure rate, as opposed to being a likely death sentence.
That’s good news for him, certainly, but it begs the question of how and why there was an international health scare about his condition and travels.
After a Tuesday news conference at the National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver, where Speaker is now being treated, it was clear that a serious mistake had been made in his original diagnosis – a mistake that led to the first federal quarantine order in 40 years and congressional hearings.
But you wouldn’t know that from listening to a representative from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Dr. Mitchell Cohen, director of the Coordinating Center for Infectious Diseases, talked about the difficulty of testing for TB. Furthermore, he said there is no difference in the public health response whether a person has the very serious and extensively drug-resistant (XDR) version versus the multidrug-resistant variety (MDR), which Speaker has.
That may be, but the mortality rates certainly are hugely different and would make a great deal of difference to anyone aboard one of the airline flights that Speaker irresponsibly boarded while believing he was gravely ill.
In relying on a test that Cohen admitted was imperfect, the CDC made a pariah of Speaker. Perhaps it’s a fate he deserved for fleeing across international borders and slinking into the country in a rental car from Canada instead of obeying health authorities.
Obviously, there’s blame to go around, but it’s clear that at least some of it ought to be shouldered by the CDC, a responsibility Cohen shrugged off by saying he wished testing were better.
Doctors at National Jewish tested three samples from Speaker with three different procedures and in every case came up only with the less serious strain, MDR. In fact, National Jewish tested a subculture from the original sample taken in March in Atlanta that yielded the erroneous verdict and found only MDR.
Perhaps the CDC is worried about legal action from Speaker and, well, you can pretty much bet on that. Nevertheless, the people who rely on this venerable public health institution need to trust its word.
No matter how the CDC spins it, the public is going to perceive that the agency blundered. The appropriate response is to own up to errors, pledge to examine its procedures and ask for the public’s understanding.
Maintaining the public trust is as valuable as the very talented doctors and researchers at the agency. Anything undercutting that trust cannot be tolerated.
