A while back, an attorney named Andrew Speaker made international headlines when he learned he had drug-resistant tuberculosis and, armed with that knowledge, raised a finger to everyone else and got on an airplane to Europe, subjecting countless others to his re-circulated air for hours on end.
A few days later, I was listening to asshat-pseudo-newsman John Gibson on Fox News Radio as he raised the point that Speaker is a personal injury attorney who often sues people for their negligent and unreasonable behavior that affects others.
I personally have no idea if Speaker is, indeed, a personal injury attorney, or if he engages in such arguments. I know he's an attorney, and as such he's at least studied the concept of negligence and of violating the reasonable standard of care.
I don't have enough interest in this issue to re-trace all the news articles and re-count all of Speaker's activities. My best memory of what Gibson said (and, therefore, don't accept any of this as fact, as it may be flawed) was something along these lines: Speakman was heading to Greece to get married. He learned he had TB and was told he shouldn't fly, but did so anyway. After he got to Europe, at some point he was slated to be quarantined by Italian authorities. He fled the country, heading to Prague or something like that, and eventually ended up taking an international flight to Montreal before eventually renting a car to cross into the US. Eventually he was tracked down, and he's been in seclusion in a hospital ever since.
This whole story is compounded in its outrageousness by the fact that Speaker's father-in-law works at the Center for Disease Control specifically working with...you guessed it...TB.
Anyway, the story was slipping from my consciousness, but a link on Fark.com led me to a story with this quote:
When federal health officials eventually reached him by phone in Europe with the new test results, they warned him not to fly aboard commercial aircraft, and urged him to turn himself in to local health officials. . . Instead, Speaker and his bride flew to Montreal, rented a car and drove across the U.S. border, even though officials had flagged his passport.
Interesting. I wonder if anyone contracted drug-resistant TB on the flight. I wonder how many people on the flight are quaking in fear that they might contract it. I wonder if Speaker's worried about getting sued. I think I would be.
The other interesting thing I saw in the article:
Dr. Andrew Vernon, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention TB researcher who sees patients at the Fulton County Department of Health and Wellness, had earlier appealed to Cooksey [Speaker's father-in-law] to help stop the planned wedding in Greece, according to a May 30 e-mail from a Fulton County physician. Cooksey did not put a halt to the plans; instead, he went to the wedding.
Nice.
I don't know exactly what I mean to say here. I know that this whole thing annoys me, and it alarms me that people will take risks like this with the lives of others. I also love that a lawyer is no doubt propagating all sorts of additional anti-lawyer bias in a country where lawyers are generally seen as detestable hypocrite bastards already. And although I'm sure that Speaker's father-in-law had more on his mind than the money laid out on the wedding, and his daughter's immediate happiness, when he opted against halting the nuptials, at the same time it concerns me that someone who would appear to know enough about TB to understand the potential risks didn't opt to error on the side of caution when countless other lives were in the balance.
Interested to hear any thoughts anybody may have on this...
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