Congress Wants Answers On TB Scare
Even though it turns out the man with the dangerous strain of tuberculosis may not have been very contagious after all, Congress still has some sharp questions about the failure of the government to stop him when they thought he was.
CBS News Capitol Hill correspondent Bob Fuss reports two different hearings Wednesday were focusing on the many things that seemed to go wrong, from communications failures between agencies to the fact that after Andrew Speaker was put on a list to be stopped at the border, he was able to come through anyway.
Congress was being told that no longer can individual border guards ignore a directive to stop someone, as happened in this case.
The House Homeland Security Committee was questioning federal authorities Wednesday on why they had such a hard time catching up to a man armed only with a passport, a smile and a now-rare, deadly disease.
W. Ralph Basham, commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, testified to the House panel that his agency made a mistake by admitting Speaker into the country. He said he can't explain how it happened but takes full responsibility for it.
Even before the hearing, a homeland security official said the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol henceforth would require officers to get approval from a supervisor before they override warnings like the one issued to stop the 31-year-old Speaker. The official spoke on condition of anonymity ahead of the congressional testimony.
Speaker, an Atlanta lawyer, prompted an international health scare when he flew to Europe last month for his wedding and honeymoon. Once there, he disregarded instructions by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to turn himself in to local health officials in Italy.
Instead, Speaker flew to Canada on May 24, then drove across the border into the U.S., despite a lookout alert issued to all border posts.
With a single wave of the hand, a lone U.S. border officer in Champlain, N.Y., negated days of efforts by health and security officials to track down the globe-trotting groom.
"This is an across-the-board meltdown" in border safeguards, said Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., a senior member of the House panel. "It's a very serious problem because biological threat is real in our future any time, and it could be something like this or smallpox," Harman told CNN on Wednesday.
DHS officials have launched an investigation into the Champlain officer's conduct even as they have defended their own procedures.
"We're very confident that the system actually worked," Jayson Ahern, the No. 2 official at Customs and Border Patrol, insisted last week. "There was a breakdown on the part of the officer."
Yet lawmakers also planned to examine whether CDC officials mishandled their own role in the case, and whether they misunderstood the legal tools at their disposal to find and confine Speaker.
Speaking by telephone from his hospital isolation ward in Denver, Speaker testified to Congress that health officials told him, "I was not a threat to anyone."
Speaker also said that he was told that he was not contagious. The next witness, an official of the Fulton County, Ga., health department, said Speaker was told he was not "highly contagious."
State Department policy requires sick U.S. citizens abroad to pay their own way home. U.S. health officials felt that Speaker was such a danger to others, however, that they wanted to help transport him but were unable to find an airplane with the separate air ventilation required to prevent the spread of the disease before Speaker fled.
"We have a gap there," Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told a separate Senate hearing.
The CDC now is trying to revamp its own aircraft to transport safely anyone else who has a disease transmitted by air.