2007 Tuberculosis Scare - Background

Background

In January 2007, Speaker suffered a fall and went to the doctor, concerned that he had bruised a rib. Doctors X-rayed his chest and found an abnormality that required further testing. Andrew Speaker was suspected of having TB when a positive PPD test came back on March 2, 2007. His third CT scan was done on March 3 and a bronchoscopy was done on March 8. After 18 days of incubation the isolate was sent to CDC for confirmation of his susceptibility results that were done by the Georgia Department of Human Resources (DHR).

On March 28, 2007 his doctors and the health department believed the TB strain Speaker had was a resistant one and communicated this to the CDC. On May 1 the apparent MDR TB infection was discussed with the CDC lab by his doctors and they discussed discontinuing the treatment he was on at that time. On May 9 the suspicion of MDR TB was confirmed. A meeting was held with Fulton County Health Officials, his doctors, his fiancée and his father and father-in-law on May 10, 2007. At this time he was told that he was not contagious and not a threat to anyone but that he would need to go to Denver for treatment. It would take a few weeks to arrange this. He was advised, or according to some accounts strongly recommended, not to travel.

Read more about this topic:  2007 Tuberculosis Scare

Famous quotes containing the word background:

    They were more than hostile. In the first place, I was a south Georgian and I was looked upon as a fiscal conservative, and the Atlanta newspapers quite erroneously, because they didn’t know anything about me or my background here in Plains, decided that I was also a racial conservative.
    Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)

    Pilate with his question “What is truth?” is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.
    Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)

    Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)