Quarantined TB patient: 'I hope they forgive me'

DENVER — An Atlanta attorney quarantined with a dangerous strain of tuberculosis apologized to his fellow plane passengers in an interview aired Friday, and insisted he was told he wasn't contagious or a threat to anyone.

"I've lived in this state of constant fear and anxiety and exhaustion for a week now, and to think that someone else is now feeling that, I wouldn't want anyone to feel that way. It's awful," Andrew Speaker told ABC's "Good Morning America" from his hospital room in Denver.

Sitting in street clothes but speaking through a face mask, he repeatedly apologized to the dozens of airline passengers and crew members now anxiously awaiting their own test results because of the exposure to him.

"I don't expect for people to ever forgive me. I just hope that they understand that I truly never meant to put them in harm," he said, his voice cracking.

Speaker, 31, said he, his doctors and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention all knew he had TB that was resistant to front-line drugs before he flew to Europe for his wedding and honeymoon last month. But he said he was advised then that he wasn't contagious or a danger to anyone.

Officials told him they would prefer he didn't fly, but no one ordered him not to, he said. Speaker said his father, also a lawyer, taped that meeting.

"My father said, 'OK, now are you saying, prefer not to go on the trip because he's a risk to anybody, or are you simply saying that to cover yourself?' And they said, we have to tell you that to cover ourself, but he's not a risk."

Speaker was in Europe when he learned tests showed he had, not just TB, but an especially dangerous, extensively drug-resistant strain.

"He was told in no uncertain terms not to take a flight back," said Dr. Martin Cetron, director of the CDC's division of global migration and quarantine. Cetron said Wednesday that in conversations between health officials and Speaker before the flight, "they clearly told him not to travel," but "there were no legal orders in place preventing his travel, and no laws were broken."

Speaker, his new wife and her 8-year-old daughter were already in Europe when the CDC contacted him and told him to turn himself in immediately at a clinic there and not take another commercial flight.

He said he felt as if the CDC had suddenly "abandoned him." At that point, he said, he believed if he didn't get to the specialized clinic in Denver, he would die.