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Congress Reviews Flaws in TB Response
Congress Reviews Flaws in TB Response
By DEVLIN BARRETT 06.06.07, 8:33 AM ET
By DEVLIN BARRETT 06.06.07, 8:33 AM ET
U.S. border officials are changing their procedures after an embarrassing incident allowed a patient with a dangerous form of tuberculosis into the country.
The new rules limiting an officer's discretion may not be good enough for Congress.
The House Homeland Security Committee planned to question 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.
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 31-year-old Andrew 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.
Speaker, meanwhile, said that while the ease with which he was allowed to re-enter the country pointed to security gaps, "that, obviously, wasn't our goal."
"What good can come out of all this attention, hopefully that's one of them - if there are issues of homeland security, that those will be taken care of," Speaker said in an interview aired Wednesday on ABC's "Good Morning America." "I hope that some policy is put into effect for when exactly, if people are in trouble, we should go and get them."
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.