Isolation and Law
Before a Congressional hearing, Speaker and his father played audio recordings from CDC and Fulton County health officials which say he was not a danger to others. He asked such questions on five recordings repeatedly and was given the same answers even after stating on two recordings that he was going out of the country and the CDC later admitted they were aware and waited until he had already left before taking further actions.
Speaker was in New York when the CDC served him with an isolation order but CDC director Julie Gerberding stated that the government was legally constrained prior to that order. The federal statute granting quarantine authority allows isolation or quarantine but only for individuals coming into the country from a foreign country or territory.
Georgia TB law may have required Speaker to be confined for two weeks and only allowed travel for medical appointments. A court confinement order can isolate a patient only after the infected patient ignores medical advice. This method can be overridden by a declaration of public health emergency by the governor of Georgia.
On July 12, 2007 it was announced that seven Canadians and two Czechs will launch $1.3 million in civil lawsuits in Montreal. Eight were on the same flight as Andrew Speaker and one was a roommate of one of those on the same flight.
Read more about this topic: 2007 Tuberculosis Scare
Famous quotes containing the words isolation and/or law:
“The one happiness is to shut one’s door upon a little room, with a table before one, and to create; to create life in that isolation from life.”
—Eleonora Duse (1859–1924)
“The law of nature is alternation for evermore. Each electrical state superinduces the opposite. The soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone for a season, that it may exalt its conversation or society.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)