Lawyer needs a lawyer

Even before you know anything about the people involved, the odyssey of TB-infected American Andrew Speaker is pretty newsworthy. Speaker was diagnosed with a rare and dangerous form of TB in January. In May he met with the Centre for Disease Control (CDC), which claims that it warned him against travelling. Undeterred, he flew from Atlanta to Paris to get married, then headed over to Greece for his honeymoon, all the while breathing germs all over his unwitting fellow passengers. Speaker claimed he was never explicitly warned by the CDC not to travel, but the fact that he chose to return to the US by a very indirect route (Athens-Rome-Prague-Montreal) suggests that he knew he was doing something naughty. In a final twist, when he crossed back into the US from Canada at Pont Champlain, his named popped up on the INS computer --but the immigration agent waved him through on the grounds that he didn't look ill! After all this, Speaker turned himself in to the CDC in New York.

This looks like an everyday story of personal irresponsibility (Speaker) and bureaucratic incompetence (the INS guy, and maybe also the CDC), until you find out a bit more about the people involved. Speaker's new father-in-law works for the CDC, in a division responsible for....eliminating tuberculosis! He knew about Speaker's condition. Bizarrely, he has denied that Speaker caught the disease from him, when you would have thought his priority would have been to explain why he failed to dissuade Speaker from going ahead with the wedding to his daughter. And Speaker himself -- well, he's a personal injury lawyer, or as the less charitable would describe it, an ambulance chaser.

Speaker has thrown himself on the mercy of the hundreds of people now worrying about the risk of having caught TB from him over the past month: "I just hope they can forgive me and understand that I really believed I wasn't putting people at risk, because that's what people told me". You can just imagine Speaker's lip curling in disdain if one of the people he faces off against in a courtroom ever essayed such a statement. If there's any justice, Speaker may soon find himself getting a defendant's perspective on the US litigation system.