Killer Tb Patient Sorry for Flying Home

A lawyer infected with a contagious and deadly strain of tuberculosis claimed yesterday that he returned to the United States in defiance of a flight ban because he felt the government had abandoned him to die in an Italian hospital.

Andrew Speaker, 31, said he was full of regret for putting fellow passengers in danger but believed that sneaking back into the country and reaching a specialist isolation hospital in Denver was his only chance of survival.

"I hope they can forgive me and understand that I really believed I wasn't putting people at risk," said Mr Speaker, who ignored doctors' advice to stay in Rome and await tests and medicine from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, America's federal health agency.

"People told me if I was anywhere else but Denver, I would die," he told ABC's Good Morning America.

However, the CDC director, Dr Julie Gerberding, denied the agency had abandoned Mr Speaker. "The CDC was committed to leaving no stone unturned to get him home," she said in a statement.

"We are sorry we were not able to reassure him and his family that we were working for the best solution but we have to protect the public health."

Health authorities have so far traced about 80 passengers from two transatlantic flights taken by Mr Speaker, who has the rare and drug-resistant XDR form of tuberculosis. Only 17 cases have been reported in the US since 2000, compared with 14,000 people who contract the easily treatable and less deadly strain each year.

The lawyer and his wife, Sarah, who were in Europe for their wedding and honeymoon, flew from Prague to Montreal to avoid an American airport at which they feared they would be refused admission.

He is believed to be the first TB patient placed in compulsory quarantine by the US government since 1963.