Another no-fly list failure
This no-fly failure didn’t make the headlines because it wasn’t a terrorist, but it is just as revealing of the failures in our system. Instead, of bomber, this no-fly failure involved someone engaged in germ warfare. A person with drug resistant TB decided that his desire to fly trumped the safety of several hundred people trapped in the air with him, and the system only caught him halfway through his dangerous little journey:
A man with a drug-resistant form of tuberculosis boarded a flight from Philadelphia to San Francisco last weekend despite a public health order to keep him off the plane, officials said Tuesday.
The man was intercepted at San Francisco International Airport when the US Airways plane landed on Saturday, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He was quarantined and taken to a Bay Area hospital for treatment. He had been scheduled to transfer to another flight overseas.
[snip]
The patient, who is not being identified, was added to a federal “do not board” list on Friday. It’s unclear how the man managed to get on the US Airways flight the next day. An investigation is under way.
The federal “do not board” list was created in June 2007 to prevent the spread of contagious diseases like tuberculosis. Since then, 88 people have made the list, all of them infected with tuberculosis, Cetron said.
[snip]
Tuberculosis is a bacterial infection that usually attacks the lungs. Most people infected with tuberculosis are not actively sick with it. In active cases, symptoms include a persistent, long-lasting cough, fever and night sweats.
Drug-resistant cases of tuberculosis, which are more challenging to treat than nonresistant TB, are becoming more common worldwide. San Francisco public health officials said the man on Saturday’s flight has a drug-resistant form of tuberculosis.
“If someone is untreated and they’re coughing, they are putting the infectious organisms in the air. They shouldn’t be going into enclosed environments,” said Dr. L. Masae Kawamura, director of San Francisco’s TB Control Section. “Going on a plane, that’s not OK until you’re safe to be back in the public.”
Until the government manages to do right the things it is already responsible for doing, I don’t want to give it increasing power and authority over me or my money. I struggle constantly watching the idiocy of the Left, which assures constantly assures us that, despite the government’s repeated failures to do anything efficient, this time will be different.
