Health Officials Say Man With Rare Tuberculosis Could Have Infected Airline Passenger
TB Case Brings Warning to Air Passengers
By MIKE STOBBE The Associated Press


A man with a rare and exceptionally dangerous form of tuberculosis has been placed in quarantine by the U.S. government after possibly exposing passengers and crew on two trans-Atlantic flights earlier this month, health officials said Tuesday.

This marks the first time since 1963 that the government issued a quarantine order. The last such order was to quarantine a patient with smallpox, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The CDC urged people on the same flights to get checked for tuberculosis.

The infected man flew from Atlanta to Paris on May 12 aboard Air France Flight 385. He returned to North America on May 24 aboard Czech Air Flight 104 from Prague to Montreal. The man then drove into the United States.

He cooperated with authorities after learning he had an unusually dangerous form of TB. He voluntarily went to a hospital and is not facing prosecution, officials said.

The man is hospitalized in Atlanta in respiratory isolation, according to the World Health Organization.

He was potentially infectious at the time of the flights, so CDC officials recommended medical exams for cabin crew members on those flights, as well as passengers sitting in the same rows or within two rows.

The man was infected with "extensively drug-resistant" TB, also called XDR-TB. It resists many drugs used to treat the infection. Last year, there were two U.S. cases of that strain.

Because of antibiotics and other measures, the TB rate in the United States has been falling for years. Last year, it hit an all-time low of 13,767 cases, or about 4.6 cases per 100,000 Americans.

Tuberculosis kills nearly 2 million people each year worldwide.



Remeber the first was this young man;


Is Sickness a Crime? Arizona Man With TB Locked Up Indefinitely in Solitary Confinement
Friday, April 6th, 2007

http://www.democracynow.org 27-year-old Robert Daniels is being held against his will in a Phoenix hospital ward reserved for sick prisoners. If state officials have their way, he could be there for the rest of his life. Daniels is suffering from a deadly strain of tuberculosis known as XDR-TB. Doctors say he is virtually untreatable. He has been forced to live in a hospital cell in complete isolation. [includes rush transcript]

Daniels contracted the disease while living in Russia. He returned to the United States last year and agreed to a voluntary quarantine in residential care. But Daniels violated his agreement when he went outside without a mask. Daniels says he misunderstood how much of a health risk he posed, in part because he hadn't been forced to wear a mask in Russia.

Today, Daniels has been forced to live in a hospital cell in complete isolation. His only visitors are medical staff. Sheriff's deputies have taken away his television, radio, phone and computer. He is under 24-hour surveillance and the light in his room is never turned off, even at night. His only contact to the outside world is a pay-phone. Daniels recently described his ordeal in a phone interview with the Arizona radio station KJZZ.
No, his radio, his phone and his computer. He's under 24-hour surveillance. The light in his room is never turned off, even at night. His only contact with the outside world is a pay phone.

He KNOWINGLY exposed others to an often fatal disease, he was just quaratinined but he IS a criminal!

There are now 2.

The earlier episode man might have knowingly exposed, the recent one did not know what he had.

When a major panademic comes, this does not bode well for freedom

With the recent articles also on no liability for drug companies, and that they will experiment on living people without consent, paging Dr. Mengeles, paging Dr. Mengeles...

Well I can either believe you or the CDC, a judge and CNN, they all say the second man knew but decided to travel to take care of some family business. Where do you get your "facts"? The first one KNEW AND REFUSED VOLUNTARY QUARANTINE THAT'S WHY HE WAS LOCKED UP! (he refused when ordered by a doctor then refused when ordered by a court)

Some rights are suspended in a pandemic emergency, it's been that way for the history of our country.

The article says the recent most one knew he was sick, but not that what he had.
The earlier one willfully knew, which I said

Most people don't stop working/going on when they have the flu and most people don't think they had a "brand-new" out of nowhere infectuous disease.

(one also wonders if this is not a governmental test and release of germs, much like the anthrax was inhouse, but I would be paranoid to think that)

Then the article has it wrong, I watched the press conference, they had no reason to lie as no charges were filed and the court order had been issued.

I wouldn't wonder, what surprises me is that we haven't had a HUGE TB outbreak, he'd been in Eastern Europe and the first report of a large number of cases of drug resistent TB was in Russian prisons. There have also been isolated cases of unrelated strains in Asia. This has been a cause of great concern for 15 years. I'll be blunt, the world is overpopulated and nature will find a way to reduce our numbers, the question is how it will happen. In biology there's a thing called an S curve, it describes unrestricted population growth for a species. Once you hit the top of the S curve (which we did about 20 years ago) something always happens that kills 1/2-2/3 of the population (in experiments this also proved true in lab rats, they started killing and eating each other).