Does TB Make You FLY Better?

I have never been on an airplane.  I have never been in an airport.  I have never been near anyone with TB.

But this guy, Andrew Speaker, thought it’d be cool to fly to Paris, get married in Greece and honeymoon there, then get shuffled from the Czech Republic to Montreal, drive into the States, and just spread drug-resistant TB everywhere he went.

Oh!  But he did apologize. 

Now the big fall-out is whether or not security should have caught him.  Personally, I think the minimum-wage employees staffing our airport terminals have enough garbage to worry about with terrorists, bombs, shoe-bombs, bag-bombs, box-cutters, hand lotion and breast milk.  Now they’re supposed to be able to sense disease?  Tell me, where in his security screening at the Atlanta airport was a qualified medical professional present to perform a Tuberculin skin test on Mr. Speaker?

Actually, with the 2-3 day turn-around on results, he’d have been sleeping in the airport for a while…

But is that what it requires?  Should passengers be forced to make pre-flight doctor’s visits with certain FAA-approved physicians?  Or should people be allowed to make their own decisions whether or not to fly?

It’s clear from Mr. Speaker’s little stunt that people are selfish and pig-headed.  He knowingly endangered the lives of hundreds of people, literally around the world, and couldn’t have cared less, really, because he had to get married??!?  I wonder if Mrs. Speaker knew when she married him?

This is a great example of how one person can ruin it for everybody.  We live in an age of insecurity, suspicion, lack of trust, faith, and morality.  We have people intentionally spreading fear, war, hate, and now illness?

You can’t even use the stupidity defense; this guy is a lawyer, his dad is a lawyer, and his father-in-law works for the CDC.  People with this kind of TB have been under federal quarantine since the 1960’s.  It’s not something new.  And yet he claims that he didn’t feel he was a risk?

Authorities are going nuts trying to track down the other passengers from his flights.  Overseas, they’re trying to retrace all his movements, hopefully picking out the people unfortunate enough to catch this thing from him, and safeguard their own people.

The rest of the world hates America enough.  Our foreign policy should not be, “Find a moron with a deadly disease and set him loose upon the world to spread death.”  That doesn’t sound like the makings of good relations to me.

~ by echostarlite on June 4, 2007.