Denver — Although the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention leases a private emergency jet for use in U.S. and international public health emergencies, an agency worker may not have been fully aware of its availability to bring Andrew Speaker back from Rome during their initial conversation, a CDC spokesman said Tuesday.

Dr. David Kim was the CDC tuberculosis medical officer who spoke with Speaker by phone before the man and his bride fled Italy on May 24, boarding commercial jets back to the United States.

CDC spokesman Tom Skinner said it's his impression that Kim, in the initial conversation, was focused on alerting the patient that new tests had found he had extensively drug resistant TB, on making sure Speaker didn't board an aircraft and on getting the man to an Italian health facility.

Kim has not responded to requests for interviews. Speaker and his family have said they specifically asked about using the CDC jet, but that Kim told them it had been ruled out and there was no appeal.

Kim's "objective was to obviously inform him of the XDR TB diagnosis, and secondly to make sure he didn't go anywhere," Skinner said.

Meanwhile, Skinner said, it appears Speaker's primary focus in the conversations of May 22-23 may have been how to he would get home. CDC had arranged for a former agency expert on TB — who happened to be in Rome — to meet Speaker in person and help him get to Italian health authorities. But by the time she called Speaker on May 24, he was on his way back to the United States, Skinner said.

Skinner said that while Kim was talking with Speaker, who was in Rome on his honeymoon, other CDC officials in Atlanta were considering options for transporting Speaker — including using the agency's emergency jet.

Speaker has told the AJC that he was never informed that options were being explored to return him to the United States, where he had been told that he'd die without cutting-edge treatment and surgery at National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver.

Speaker said Kim was definitive: There was no money in CDC's budget to transport him. The only option was for Speaker to come up with $140,000 to hire an air ambulance, Speaker said.

Taxpayers pay $7 million a year to lease three private jets for the CDC to use in case of emergencies. But The AJC reported on May 28 that the aircraft have gone almost nowhere in the past year.

One is for use in general health emergencies and the other two are assigned to transport workers with the Strategic National Stockpile of emergency medical supplies.

In June 2006, the AJC reported that one CDC luxury jet, a Gulfstream III, was barnstorming the country, regularly carrying Secretary of Health and Human Services Mike Leavitt to news conferences and meetings. HHS is the CDC's parent agency.

But since Leavitt's taxpayer funded jet-setting came under scrutiny by Congress after the newspaper's report, the plane has mostly sat idle at a Cartersville airport. This Gulfstream III, which could have possibly been used to pick Speaker and his bride up in Italy, costs $250,000 a month just to have on standby 24 hours a day. When it's used, it costs an additional $3,000 per flight hour.

The U.S. House Homeland Security Committee will hold a hearing Wednesday on how federal agencies, including the CDC, handled the XDR TB case.

Speaker has said that he never would have left the United States for his long-planned wedding in Greece and honeymoon around Europe if he had been told he was a threat to anyone. He said Fulton County health officials, who had been overseeing his TB case since January, told him he was not contagious.

County health officials will not answer questions about what they told Speaker about his potential to infect anyone. They'll only say they strongly advised him against traveling.

Tests at National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver, where Speaker is under going intensive antibiotic treatment, continue to show his is "relatively non-contagious," according to the doctors.

While TB can be grown from his samples when incubated for weeks, no TB germs can be found in his sputum — a key indicator of how contagious a person is. In addition, Speaker has never been sick with the disease: He doesn't cough and has no fever. Lack of coughing or other signs of illness are unusual, but further reduce the likelihood he has infected others, experts say.

Speaker's bride and her 8-year-old daughter have repeatedly tested negative for TB, as have his other close family and friends, doctors have said.

Speaker, 31, wouldn't even know he has TB if he hadn't suffered a rib injury in January. Doctors happened to notice a spot on his lung during an X-ray for the injury, Speaker has said.

In a brief telephone interview with the AJC on Monday, Speaker said he feels good and is riding an exercise bike in his room daily. He's receiving several drugs, he said. Speaker, a lawyer, said he has a desk and a laptop in his room and is continuing to work on his clients' cases.

"It's funny that something like this happens and the people who don't know you trash you. People who do know you and have met you face to face stand by you. It means a lot," he said.