Canadian passengers sue U.S. TB traveler

From Reuters:
Passengers who were aboard a flight with a U.S. tuberculosis patient in May launched nine civil lawsuits against him on Thursday, claiming that he knowingly exposed them to the disease.

Andrew Speaker, an American lawyer, sparked international health alarms after he flew around Europe and to Canada with what was then believed to be a deadly form of tuberculosis, known as XDR TB.

Speaker was recently found not to have had XDR TB but an equally contagious form of the disease, known as MDR, or multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis. MDR is easier to treat than XDR, or extensively drug-resistant TB

The suit was launched by seven Canadian passengers and two Czech women who were on the Czech Airlines flight with Speaker from Prague to Montreal, their lawyer, Anlac Nguyen, said.

The suits are worth a total of C$1.37 million ($1.3 million), he said. ...more

Tubercular man apologizes to flyers

From the Calgary Sun:
The Atlanta lawyer quarantined with a dangerous strain of tuberculosis apologized to fellow-airline passengers yesterday.

He insisted he was told before he set out for his wedding in Europe he was no danger to anyone.

"I've lived in this state of constant fear and anxiety and exhaustion for a week now, and to think that someone else is now feeling that, I wouldn't want anyone to feel that way. It's awful," Andrew Speaker said. ...more

When drug-resistant tuberculosis goes extreme

From the Globe and Mail:
Until recently, researchers thought that multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, or MDR TB, was as bad as the disease got.

They were wrong.

In 2005, doctors in South Africa discovered a new strain of the disease. Extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis - or XDR TB - was found to withstand all of the front-line drugs in the tuberculosis treatment arsenal.

Officials in Canada and the United States are searching for passengers who may have travelled with a U.S. man infected with XDR TB on two transatlantic flights this month. ...more

Authorities hunt 70-80 passengers who sat near TB patient on flights

This is a rather disturbing story. While it seems unlikely anyone was infected, I know I wouldn't want to have been sitting next to this person on a flight.

From the Globe and Mail:
Public health officials in the United States and Canada revealed Wednesday they are looking for roughly 70 to 80 people on two recent transatlantic flights who were seated in close proximity to a man infected with a rare and potentially deadly form of tuberculosis.

In Canada, officials are seeking anyone who sat in Row 12 — plus the two rows ahead and behind — of Czech Airline flight 0104 to Montreal from Prague on May 24.

Officials of the Public Health Agency of Canada have obtained the passenger manifest — the airline's official list of passengers — and are using it to try to trace the passengers to urge them to undergo testing for TB. ...more

Rapid spread of disease alarms experts

From the Globe and Mail:
The public-health world has been alarmed since the early 1990s about what's called multidrug-resistant (MDR) tuberculosis.

Drug resistance emerges when people are prescribed the wrong drugs or do not complete a course of treatment, which allows for the natural selection of bacteria that are resistant to the drugs.

MDR is found all over the world, with the fastest growth in cases in China and Russia. It is curable in about half of cases, but patients must take highly toxic drugs for as long as two years to get rid of it. (The other half of people die of the disease within a few years.) ...more

Complacency about disease is dangerous

From the Ottawa Citizen:
Paul Thorn has seen the monster that's coming for us. He's been in a hospital bed with it. It attacked his body and nearly drove him out of his mind.

Ten years later, he's cured of the multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis that attacked him in a hospital in London. Seven people died in that outbreak. He's the only survivor. What makes his survival more impressive is that he was already infected with HIV....more