FRIDAY, June 1 (HealthDay News) -- The Georgia man infected with a dangerous form of tuberculosis who became the first American quarantined since 1963 arrived for treatment Thursday at a Denver hospital that specializes in infectious diseases.
The 31-year-old man was identified Thursday as Andrew Speaker, an Atlanta personal injury lawyer, whose father-in-law is a long-term U.S. government microbiologist specializing in the spread of TB.
Speaker was flown to Denver from Atlanta accompanied by Federal marshals after being quarantined at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta for two days. He entered Denver's National Jewish Medical Center, saying he felt fine, according to a hospital statement.
Speaker had taken two trans-Atlantic flights earlier this month for his wedding and honeymoon, possibly infecting fellow passengers in the process with what has been diagnosed as "extensively drug-resistant" TB, also called XDR-TB. This form of the disease resists many drugs used to treat the infection.
Doctors at the Denver hospital held a Thursday afternoon press conference after initially evaluating Speaker.
"He is smear-negative," Gwen Huitt, M.D., an attending physician on the infectious disease unit, told reporters. "He is considered low communicability."
The patient is not showing any symptoms, she said, adding, "It is possible that the patient has had the disease for two years, and the organism woke up in the past few months."
But, she added, left untreated, he would have become worse and more contagious. The hospital is testing other antibiotics and developing a drug regimen that could include as many as five antibiotics, Huitt said.
Speaker's father-in-law, Robert C. Cooksey, a research microbiologist with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's division of tuberculosis elimination, issued a terse statement Thursday afternoon through the CDC, asking for his family's privacy and denying that he knew of his new son-in-law's travel plans.
"As part of my job, I am regularly tested for TB. I do not have TB, nor have I ever had TB. My son-in-law's TB did not originate from myself or the CDC's labs, which operate under the highest levels of biosecurity," said Cooksey, who has worked at the CDC for 32 years.
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