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[linnea]

Jesus fuck. I want to personally don an SCBA and then go over and fuck*ng wring that asshole's neck. Watch him flop around while he tries to get me off of him. Throw his worthless carcass at his wife's feet. I am seriously, SERIOUSLY pissed about this.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/31/health/31cnd-tb.html

First of all, I live in a place where you can literally catch TB at the grocery store. Or when I have to go to a bunkhouse because some processor just gave birth in a bathroom and is denying that she was pregnant, or because some malingerer wants an ambulance so he can get out of work. Anyway...It sucks and you have to be careful and get tested frequently. As a healthcare provider I have to get routine TB tests. It's a simple fuck*ng skin patch test. We have a highly mobile population of people who come from all countries coming here to work in the giraffe processing plants. I am very, VERY sensitive to the TB issue.

First, he ignores his doctor's advice and goes on his honeymoon wedding trip of a lifetime. "Give other people on the plane TB? Fuck, I just paid for these tickets, it'll cost me like $50 to change them!!! Screw the other people on the plane, I don't give a fuck if they get TB. I'm a rich asshole American, I can just go to the doctor. What? They might not have insurance? Well too fuckin' bad for them!"

Then...he fears for his own sweet, precious ass when he's abroad. "Wah fuckin' wah! I thought I would die if I didn't get back to the United States for treatment! I have this super-dangerous highly communicable disease? Well, *my* life matters more than the 900 sorry fucks that I'm going to encounter on my way back." SO YOU'RE GOING TO PUT EVERYBODY ELSE AT RISK SO YOUR RICH, PAMPERED ASS CAN GET TREATMENT.  Brilliant. You could have gotten treatment in Italy or Greece, dick! Why not get a fuck*ng medevac flight? That would have been the responsible thing to do. Now he and his wife are bitching that the CDC and US left them high and dry. You know what? They should have just shot you and shoved your ass into an incinerator.

This is how a pandemic gets started. This is how people spread highly communicable disease. Rather than act for the greater good, man up, and get to a clinic in Italy or wherever the FUCK he was at, he had to put everyone else at risk. Who knows how many people have the highly dangerous drug-resistant tuberculosis now.

[theinevitable]

...my understanding is that he has a really uncommunicable version of TB that doesn't seem to be present in his breath? is that a lie?

that's a whole lot of hate, linnea.

[Golfhaus]

My wife was telling me that his wife was saying that this was all justified, because they were going for their wedding, and "people need to understand, a bride has to have her day." Because their wedding was WAY more important than the health of the 800 people he was in close proximity to on those planes. Christ. He must have hell of such as a life insurance policy. I know if I went to Sara a month before our wedding and said, "Baby, you know that trip I took to Asia? I caught tuberculosis there," the brakes would have burned a hole in the road, things would have come to such a stop.

I guess they've been claiming that as an American, he has "a right" to receive American medical care. Fuck you, there are millions of Americans who don't have "the right" to medical care because they can't afford it, and THEY didn't endanger hundreds with a serious disease by being douchebags.

[linnea]

...my understanding is that he has a really uncommunicable version of TB that doesn't seem to be present in his breath? is that a lie?

that's a whole lot of hate, linnea.

He has one of the most VIRULENT forms of TB. It is MEDICATION RESISTANT. This dude was placed under FEDERAL QUARANTINE by US MARSHALS for the first case of forcible quarantine since 1963.

This is a huge fuck*ng deal.

I'm sorry if I sound a little tightly wound but I'm really angry about this.

[theinevitable]

virulence is not the same as communicability, though. I have heard that his strain was not easily communicable because there were no lesions in the lungs, and so it was not in his breath.
I mean, if even his wife didn't get it? That seems like a good indication that it is not very communicable.

[Golfhaus]

The difference between "didn't" and "couldn't," though, is substantial.

I get worried if I sit next to someone fighting a cold on a 45-minute regional jet flight back to Newport News. Trans-oceanic next to a TB patient would make me homicidal.

[linnea]

virulence is not the same as communicability, though. I have heard that his strain was not easily communicable because there were no lesions in the lungs, and so it was not in his breath.
I mean, if even his wife didn't get it? That seems like a good indication that it is not very communicable.

There has been a mysterious turn in some of the press to portray him in a sympathetic light, i.e., the media sources who can be bought by his smarmy PR firm.

[jaydub]

His wife being a well-fed, healthy young woman - I'm less concerned about her than any infants, immune compromised, or elderly people he may have come in contact with during his little typhoid Mary adventure.  I don't give a flying fuck at a donut hole what excuses he floats.  If you have TB, you don't get into an enclosed environment with hundreds of other people for hours and hours.  Basic consideration for others.  Basic.  Pricks like this douche give the rest of us a bad name.

[linnea]

His wife being a well-fed, healthy young woman - I'm less concerned about her than any infants, immune compromised, or elderly people he may have come in contact with during his little typhoid Mary adventure.  I don't give a flying fuck at a donut hole what excuses he floats.  If you have TB, you don't get into an enclosed environment with hundreds of other people for hours and hours.  Basic consideration for others.  Basic.  Pricks like this douche give the rest of us a bad name.

Quoted for truth. Thank you for backing me up on this one, jay.

[jaydub]

My pleasure.  Thanks for standing on the line for the rest of us as a first responder.  Folks like you are the glue that holds society together.

[linnea]

You're welcome.

Heh... I just reread my post and I'm surprised that nobody said, "Somebody nice. Somebody nice! Don't go to the beach! Stay off the beach, Somebody nice!" That is a lot of anger, but I feel a little better writing it down. Not as good as it would feel to watch Speaker spaz out and die in an airless chamber, though.

[wombat]

I can see going to the beach on this one honestly... there's plenty of blame to go around, it's not just this one idiot guy.  How about the border guard who let him through from Canada?  He saw the guy's name on a list and thought he didn't look sick so he let him go.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/01/health/01tb.html

Maybe this guy did everyone a favor in a weird way - there are obviously a lot of lessons that need to be learned from this.

[Nabubrush]

Maybe this guy did everyone a favor in a weird way - there are obviously a lot of lessons that need to be learned from this.

Oh Wombat. If only people actually learned anymore.

Anyway, yeah, fuck THIS guy.

[side_show]

The level of bullshit in this man's behavior is just... well horrifying I guess it the best way to describe it.  Talk about making Americans look bad - this is the epitome of the stereotype right fuck*ng there.  He's such an embarrassment, such a perfect totem of the sense of entitlement and egotism that makes Europeans hate Americans in the first place.  Way to go buddy.  Way to set your country's image back another ten paces. 

I'd like to see him punished in a really nice public way - like maybe everyone on the plane, in the airports, at the places he stayed all get to take turns slapping him as hard as they fuck*ng can.

Also, his wife not having it isn't really a signifier of anything.  There are plenty of examples of couples where one partner has HIV and the other never gets it (due to resistance and/or luck), but that doesn't mean the infected partner isn't walking around with a potentially deadly disease.  Whether his wife didn't get it, or her TB expert dad told him it was safe or whatever, none of this matters.  He was told repeatedly not to travel, and he just made horrible, selgiraffe choices to go against what he was told. 

I'm sure this guy will be such a social pariah that he will lose out big time financially if nothing else.  The money they wanted to save in rescheduling the wedding will likely be a tiny increment of what he'll lose in the long term related to publically branding himself as a total jerk with disregard for common sense.

[theinevitable]

ok, am I the only person who doesn't have in-detail knowledge of TB? If I were told I had TB, I would say "um, ok. What does that mean?" The limit of my knowledge is that a lot of people in books die of it, and that my grandmother had it as a child. Is it such common knowledge that he would certainly know how bad it was? Possibly my defense of him is due to my own ignorance.

I don't know. I am a fan of never chalking up to meanness or selgiraffeness what I can attribute to sheer human ignorance and stupidity.