Father-In-Law Is CDC Microbiologist

The man who traveled overseas from Atlanta, GA last month -- despite a doctor's warning that he had tuberculosis -- has a name. He is attorney Andrew Speaker, 31, and he's currently receiving treatment at a specialized medical center in Denver, CO.

And judging from media reports, he allegedly should have known better.

As Aero-News reported, Speaker boarded a commercial jet out of Atlanta on May 14 for a transatlantic trip to his wedding, another for his honeymoon. He flew on seven different flights on three different airlines -- including flights from Rome to Prague, and on to Montreal, after doctors informed him he carried a particularly nasty, extremely drug-resistant form of the disease, known as XDR-TB.

Speaker maintains doctors advised him against traveling before he left with his fiance to get married in Italy, though they didn't forbid him from doing so. Though officials with the Center for Disease Control contacted him in Rome and told him to cancel his commercial tickets and wait to be picked up by authorities, Speaker went ahead and flew home... for what he called a fear of being treated outside the US. He entered the US from Canada through a border checkpoint.

"I'm a very well-educated, successful, intelligent person," Speaker told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution this week, speaking from his room in an area hospital, detained under the first federal medical quarantine issued since 1963. "This is insane to me that I have an armed guard outside my door when I have cooperated with everything other than the whole solitary-confinement-in-Italy thing."

In yet another bizarre twist to this surreal tale, comes word Speaker's new father-in-law is himself a doctor, with an extensive knowledge of communicable diseases like TB. Bob Cooksey is a microbiologist with the CDC, who specializes in tuberculosis and similar bacterial diseases.

Though he wouldn't say whether he reported his son-in-law to the authorities, as some have speculated (the CDC also won't comment how it learned about Speaker's predicament), Cooksey did say he gave Speaker some "fatherly advice" when he learned his daughter's soon-to-be husband had the disease.

Passengers onboard some of the same flights as Speaker believe it was "insane" for a "well-educated, successful, intelligent person" to take the risks he did, potentially exposing those around him to a deadly disease.

"It's still very scary," University of South Carolina-Aiken student Laney Wiggins, one of over two dozens students at the school who were onboard the same flight as Speaker, told The Associated Press. "That is an outrageous number of people that he was very reckless with their health. It's not fair. It's selfish."

In a Friday interview with ABC, Speaker apologized to passengers now having to get skin tests, to see if they were infected. "I'm very sorry for any grief or pain that I have caused anyone."

For the moment, it appears no other people were infected. Gwen Huitt, a doctor at Denver's National Jewish Medical and Research Center, told WebMD Speaker's chest x-rays and CT scans revealed "no surprises," and that his TB shows a low likelihood of easily spreading to others.

Speaker himself is "doing very well," Dr. Huitt added, saying the man has started an aggressive drug regiment, and is even using an exercise bike in his negative air-pressure isolation room. For the moment, he is asymptomatic.

FMI: www.cdc.gov, http://atlantadivorce.poweradvocates.com