WASHINGTON — The globe-trotting groom with a highly dangerous strain of tuberculosis whose travels last month caused an international health scare told a Senate panel Wednesday that he had no idea he was contagious.
"I don't want this, and I wouldn't have wanted to give it to someone else," said Andrew Speaker, a 31-year-old Atlanta lawyer now in quarantine at a Denver hospital.
"CDC knew that I had this," he said, referring to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "I was repeatedly told I was not contagious, that I was not a threat to anyone."
But even as Speaker testified via telephone before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies, House members in another hearing room raised concerns about the potential implications of his case for U.S. security against terrorists.
"We dodged a bullet," said Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee. "My question to the administration is: 'When are we going to stop dodging bullets and start protecting Americans?' "
Noting that the Sept. 11 commission had found "a failure of imagination" among intelligence officials and that the 2005 Hurricane Katrina postmortems found "a failure of initiative," Thompson said officials in this case "should have connected more dots."
Officials testifying before both committees outlined an array of failures that several members of Congress said were a wake-up call for a serious bioterrorism incident.
Dr. Julie L. Gerberding, director of the CDC, told the Senate panel that health officials felt Speaker had disregarded their advice not to travel. "In retrospect, we realize by giving this patient the benefit of doubt, we put other patients at risk," she said. "We don't want to ever be there again."
Once CDC officials had alerted Homeland Security to the situation, department lawyers conferred for two hours with lawyers from other agencies about how to put someone who was not a terrorism suspect on the airline no-fly list, Dr. Jeffrey Runge, the Department of Homeland Security's chief medical officer, told the House committee.
At that point, officials began monitoring Speaker's flight reservations back to the United States to make sure he did not change his plans. But he eluded them by making a second reservation to fly to Canada, said Jayson P. Ahern, assistant commissioner for field operations at Customs and Border Protection. That loophole, Ahern told the House committee, will be addressed as U.S. officials confer with airlines and other countries on how to better monitor international travel.
