A "furious" Sen. Tom Harkin is planning to ask tough questions today about how an Atlanta man was able to travel abroad while infected with a drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis, his spokesman said.

Julie Gerberding, director of the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Fulton County health director Steven Katkowsky are to testify before the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that oversees funding for the CDC. Harkin (D-Iowa) chairs the panel.

RICK MCKAY (ENLARGE)

Sen. Tom Harkin (left) chairs the subcommittee that will question health officials from Atlanta Wednesday on handling of Andrew Speaker's TB.

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At the same time, Gerberding's chief aide on global migration and quarantine issues, Martin Cetron, is scheduled to testify before the House Committee on Homeland Security.

Both hearings are looking into why Andrew Speaker, an Atlantan, was able to board a pair of international flights last month even though he was carrying a contagious form of TB.

The incident touched off worries that he may have exposed passengers to the disease and also raised domestic concerns over possible chinks in the armor of U.S. health, homeland security and immigration controls.

Harkin wants to know how Speaker was able to pass through federal screening procedures aimed at safeguarding the country from people who pose health risks to others, the senator's spokeswoman, Jennifer Mullin, said Tuesday.

"Sen. Harkin was furious, he was fuming, when he heard about all the cracks in the system that were evident in Mr. Speaker's chain of events," Mullin said in a telephone interview.

"This has really exposed quite a few weaknesses in the system," she said. "He wants to get to the bottom of this."

The CDC will come under scrutiny, Mullin said, partly because of what the Speaker case reveals about gaps in controlling the movement into and out of the country of people thought to have infectious diseases or who potentially pose unusually high public health threats.

"This is very much like a case study in what could have happened if we'd had something even more contagious and widespread," she said.

Another issue Harkin wants to pursue is why federally funded CDC emergency jets were not made available to transport Speaker home from Europe. Speaker, 31, a lawyer, was there on his honeymoon when he learned that he had extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis, or XDR-TB. Previously, Speaker had known he had multi-drug-resistant TB, a potentially lethal form that can withstand some drugs used to treat the disease.

Although the CDC 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 Speaker back from Rome during their initial conversation, CDC spokesman Tom Skinner said Tuesday.

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.

On Tuesday, Speaker's doctors at National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver announced that a third consecutive test of his sputum — called a smear test — failed to find any TB bacteria. Speaker has consistently been "smear negative" since he was diagnosed with TB in January.