US:US officials are looking for any possible link between the lawyer isolated after flying across Europe and the Atlantic with a dangerous form of tuberculosis and his father-in-law, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tuberculosis researcher.
Denver health officials have officially detained Andrew Speaker (31), who is being treated at Denver's National Jewish Medical and Research Center for extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR TB). It will take months or even years of intensive antibiotic therapy and perhaps surgery to treat, doctors said.
The Denver detention order allowed a rare federal order to isolate him to be lifted, officials said. Last month, the CDC invoked a federal isolation order against Mr Speaker, the first in 44 years, after he flew across Europe against public health advice.
Anyone who sat close to Mr Speaker for a prolonged time should be tested for TB, the CDC and the World Health Organisation said.
In a statement issued on Saturday, the CDC said it had spoken to 160 of the 292 US residents or citizens who were on board an Air France/Delta flight that Mr Speaker took to Paris from Atlanta on May 12th.
Officials in Europe said they were contacting their nationals who were on the flights. Doctors said Mr Speaker was not especially contagious, but 17 per cent of cases of tuberculosis have been transmitted by people not identified as highly contagious.
"The Denver Health Authority Public Health Department has issued an order that requires that the patient be detained at National Jewish Medical and Research Center until further laboratory tests indicate that he is no longer contagious," the CDC said.
"Since the order by local public health authorities puts in place measures that are sufficient to protect the public's health, the federal isolation order that has been used to ensure the patient remains in medical isolation is no longer in place," it added.
Last week Mr Speaker's father-in-law, Robert Cooksey, revealed he has worked at the CDC for 32 years in the tuberculosis division.
"CDC will be undertaking a number of reviews related to this XDR TB case," the CDC said.
Tuberculosis infects about a third of the world's population and kills 1.6 million a year. Most cases are latent, and even people with active disease can show no symptoms of illness, such as Mr Speaker.
"After exposure, it usually takes eight to 10 weeks before the TB test would show if someone had become infected," the CDC said. - (Reuters)