DENVER—Andrew Speaker, the tuberculosis patient who sparked an international public health scare in May, underwent successful surgery Tuesday morning to remove a diseased portion of his right lung, a hospital statement said.
The minimally invasive surgery, which was performed at the University of Colorado Hospital in suburban Aurora by Dr. John D. Mitchell, chief of general thoracic surgery at the hospital, took around two hours.
“Doctors say it went well and everything was routine,” the statement said.
A news conference was not planned.
Speaker, a 31-year-old Atlanta lawyer, was being treated at National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver, which specializes in TB. National Jewish and CU have a long-standing program to jointly treat patients with tuberculosis and other diseases.
National Jewish spokesman William Allstetter said Speaker was expected to remain at the CU Hospital for three to six days. He will then be transferred back to National Jewish.
Doctors at National Jewish said Speaker was “an excellent candidate” for surgery. They said the procedure would remove an infected area about the size of a tennis ball and would supplement Speaker’s antibiotic treatments.
Speaker told CNN the operation would remove the upper lobe of his right lung with the expectation that it would rid him of the disease.
Speaker told CNN medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta that the surgery would give him peace of mind.
“If you’re developing TB, even after your treatment, it can come back,” Speaker said in the interview, aired Monday. “With the amount of treatment I’m going to be on, the doctor said, ‘If you go ahead and have the surgery, you don’t have to worry 10 years from now or 20 years from now or 30 years now if it’s ever going to come back.'”
Speaker became the focus of a federal investigation and an international uproar when he went ahead with a wedding trip in Europe in May after health officials said they advised him not to fly. He also became the first American quarantined by the federal government since 1963 before being taken to National Jewish.
Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said tests indicated Speaker had extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis, or XDR-TB, which is extremely difficult to treat. But then, this month, Speaker’s doctors said subsequent testing has shown only the less dangerous multidrug-resistant TB.
