A federal judge on Wednesday dismissed a lawsuit filed against the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by an Atlanta lawyer whose misdiagnosed tuberculosis case caused an international health scare.
In 2009, Andrew Speaker sued the CDC, accusing the agency of exposing his case to create a major story to get more funding. But U.S. District Judge William Duffey, in a 60-page order, found that the record in the case did not support a finding that the CDC intentionally or willfully disseminated inaccurate, irrelevant or unnecessary information about Speaker.
Speaker was thrust into the news shortly after the CDC, at a May 29, 2007, news conference, said a man with XDR TB, an extremely drug-resistant strain, was being held in a hospital under a rare federal isolation order. The agency noted the TB patient had recently flown on an international flight and that all of the flight's passengers were being notified.
A media storm erupted. Speaker was soon identified as the quarantined patient who had recently traveled to Greece for his wedding and to Italy on his honeymoon. He returned after he was told that preliminary tests showed he had XDR TB.
Despite the public perception of Speaker as a modern-day Typhoid Mary, tests at a Denver hospital later showed he didn't have the XDR TB that the CDC had cited, but a more treatable form of drug-resistant TB.
In October 2010, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals revived Speaker's lawsuit, saying he had provided "enough factual material to raise a reasonable inference, and thus a plausible claim, that the CDC was the source of the disclosures at issue."
The case was returned to U.S. District Court and Speaker amended his lawsuit. But, once again, Duffey granted the CDC's motion asking that the case be dismissed before trial.
"[Speaker] does not offer any direct evidence that any official from the CDC retrieved and intentionally or willfully disclosed his identity to the public and members of the media prior to when his identity was first reported," Duffey wrote.
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