The CDC Cannot Handle Drug Resistant TB and It Can Not Inform the Citizens of the USA that Advancing Paternal Age is a Robust Risk Factor for Autism

Speaker Contradicts CDC On TB Warnings
Border Patrol Did Not Stop Speaker

POSTED: 7:04 am PDT June 6, 2007


Andrew Speaker told a U.S. Senate panel Wednesday that he always fully cooperated with health officials and told them his travel plans, contradicting testimony from the head of the Centers for Disease Control, who said that he violated a sense of trust.

Speaker, a 31-year-old lawyer from Atlanta, caused an international scare after taking two trans-Atlantic flights to Europe for his wedding and honeymoon while infected with extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis.

He said he was told he was not contagious and was told he was not a threat to his wife or daughter. He also pointed out that he was allowed to continue working and going to court, despite his diagnosis.


Speaker was in Italy when health agencies determined he had XDR-TB, not just multiple drug-resistant TB........


..................................................................................


Family: CDC Said TB Patient Not Contagious
National Jewish Says First Two Sputum Tests Negative

POSTED: 11:38 am MDT June 4, 2007
UPDATED: 6:43 pm MDT June 4, 2007



DENVER -- The family of Andrew Speaker, the 31-year-old Atlanta attorney in isolation at a Denver hospital with a rare and dangerous form of tuberculosis, is speaking out.

In an exclusive interview with ABC's Good Morning America, Cheryl and Ted Speaker and Robert and Betsy Cooksey said they are "in hell" and "we just want to get out of hell."

They said they are frustrated that while on the surface it appears as though Speaker was reckless in his decision to travel to and from Europe, they claim that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gave them no indication that Speaker was contagious with his drug-resistant TB
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Wednesday, June 6, 2007 - Page updated at 02:06 PM




TB-infected traveler tells Congress he wasn't on the run
By DEVLIN BARRETT

The Associated Press

Related

Sign up for our Travel and Outdoors newsletters
Sign up for NWsource Travel Deals newsletter

WASHINGTON — The globe-trotting tuberculosis patient now in quarantine insisted to Congress today that doctors told him he wasn't contagious and didn't order him to stay in the United States for treatment — even as health officials painted a picture of a man on the run.

"I didn't go running off or hide from people. It's a complete fallacy, it's a lie," Andrew Speaker, a 31-year-old Atlanta lawyer, said by telephone from the Denver hospital room where he remains in government-ordered isolation.

But in testimony to a Senate subcommittee, federal and local health officials said Speaker took an international flight two days earlier than planned after he had been told he had a drug-resistant form of TB and should not travel.

Fulton County health officials told Speaker, "No you should not travel," Dr. Steven R. Katkowsky, the health department's director, said. "Was he ordered not to travel? The answer to that was no. The local health department does not have the authority to prohibit or order somebody not to travel."

U.S. border officials told Congress this morning that a lone customs officer undid their efforts to stop a man with a dangerous form of tuberculosis from entering the country — but that explanation was met with skepticism from lawmakers who said the case exposed plenty of holes in the nation's security.

"We dodged a bullet," House Homeland Security Committee chairman Bennie Thompson said as he opened a hearing into the case of Speaker, whose wedding and honeymoon travel caused an international health scare.

State Department policy requires sick U.S. citizens abroad to pay their own way home. But U.S. health officials felt that Speaker was such a danger to others that they wanted to help transport him — only to be unable to find an airplane with the separate air ventilation required to prevent TB's spread before Speaker fled.

TB traveler's trail


The Centers for Disease Control and international health authorities are contacting people who may have been exposed to Andrew Speaker, the U.S. traveler with extensively drug-resistant TB. (For more information on the disease and the controversy surrounding Speaker, see www.cdc.gov/tb/xdrtb/)

Here are some details of his travels:

— He left Atlanta on May 12 on Air France flight 385/codeshare Delta flight DL8517, arriving in Paris on May 13

— He flew from Paris to Athens on May 14 on Air France flight 1232

— On May 16 he flew on Olympic Airlines flight 560 from Athens to Santorini, Greece for his wedding.

— On May 21 he flew from Mykonos, Greece to Athens and then from Athens to Rome

— On May 24, after being told by health authorities not to fly, he flew from Rome to Prague on Czech Air Flight 0727. The same day he flew to Montreal aboard Czech Air Flight 0104

— He drove from Montreal to New York on the same day, crossing the U.S.-Canada border even though his passport triggered an electronic notification after U.S. officials flagged it.

— The CDC says it is very unlikely anyone aboard the shorter flights could have been infected. Only exposure of eight hours or more could have infected anyone, so only those who were on trans-Atlantic flights are being contacted.

Seattle Times staff and news services
"We have a gap there," Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told a separate Senate hearing.


---------------------------------------------------------------------------------



Prenatal and Perinatal Risk Factors for Autism
A Review and Integration of Findings

Alexander Kolevzon, MD; Raz Gross, MD, MPH; Abraham Reichenberg, PhD


Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 2007;161:326-333.

Objective To review the evidence for the presence of prenatal and perinatal factors that affect the risk of autism and autism spectrum disorders.

Data Sources Relevant articles were identified by searching MEDLINE, screening reference lists of original studies, and searching major journals likely to publish epidemiological studies on the topic. ....




The results of this review show that 3 of the 4 population-based studies28-29,32 to examine paternal age reported a significant association with risk of autism and ASDs. The fourth study31 also found that paternal age was older in fathers of case patients with autism compared with fathers of controls, although this relationship was statistically weaker in the adjusted analysis. Thus, advancing paternal age is consistently associated with increased risk of autism and ASDs.
Advanced paternal age has been associated with several congenital disorders, including Apert syndrome,40 craniosynostosis,41 situs inversus,42 syndactyly,43 cleft lip and/or palate,44-45 hydrocephalus,44 neural tube defects,46 and Down syndrome.47 In addition, advanced paternal age has been associated with schizophrenia15 and decreased intellectual capacities in the offspring.48 The most widely proposed mechanism underlying these congenital anomalies is known as the "copy error" hypothesis, first proposed by Penrose.49 After puberty, spermatocytes divide every 16 days, and by the age of 35 years, approximately 540 cell divisions have occurred. As a result, de novo genetic mutations that result from replication errors and defective DNA repair mechanisms are believed to propagate in successive clones of spermatocytes. These mutations accumulate with advancing paternal age and thus help explain how this disorder, which has a large genetic component, can be maintained in the population despite reduced reproduction in affected individuals.-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------


May 2007 PATERNAL AGE AND AUTISM ARE ASSOCIATED IN A FAMILY-BASED SAMPLE

: Mol Psychiatry. 2007 May;12(5):419-421.Paternal age and autism are associated in a family-based sample.Cantor RM, Yoon JL, Furr J, Lajonchere CM.
[1] 1Department of Human Genetics, David Geffen School of Medicine at University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA [2] 2Department of Pediatrics, David Geffen School of Medicine at University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA [3] 3AGRE Consortium, Los Angeles, CA, USA.

PMID: 17453057 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]


The paternal age distribution of the AGRE fathers, whose first child is autistic differs significantly from that of the 'control' sample (P=0.005). A 2 goodness-of-fit test with 2 degrees of freedom was conducted using percents in the 'control' group age categories to calculate the expected values in the AGRE sample. The shift toward higher paternal ages in those with an affected first-born is seen most dramatically in the group of AGRE fathers who are 30–39 years inclusive, which is 54.7% of the distribution compared with the 41.9 % that is expected. We interpret this shifted age distribution to provide support for the recently reported finding by Reichenberg and co-workers that autism risk is associated with advancing paternal age.
Labels: CM Lajonchere, J Furr, JL Yoon, RM Cantor