From The "World Revolves Around Me" File

A man with a form of tuberculosis so dangerous he is under the first U.S. government-ordered quarantine since 1963 had health officials around the world scrambling Wednesday to find about 80 passengers who sat within five rows of him on two trans-Atlantic flights.

The man told a newspaper he took the first flight from Atlanta to Europe for his wedding, then the second flight home because he feared he might die without treatment in the U.S. The CDC is working closely with airlines to find passengers who may have been exposed to the rare, dangerous strain. [Lets hope there wasn't anyone around him with compromised immune systems.]

Health officials said the man had been advised not to fly and knew he could expose others when he boarded the jets.

The man, however, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that doctors didn't order him not to fly and only suggested he put off his long-planned wedding in Greece. He knew he had a form of tuberculosis and that it was resistant to first-line drugs, but he didn't realize until he was already in Europe that it could be so dangerous. The man declined to be identified because of the stigma attached to his diagnosis. [How about the stigma of being a self-absorbed douchebag who's willing to put his health concerns above the hundreds he encountered?]

He and his wife flew from Prague to Montreal on May 24 aboard Czech Air Flight 0104, then drove into the United States at Champlain, N.Y. He told the newspaper he was afraid that if he didn't get back to the U.S., he wouldn't get the treatment he needed to survive. He is now at Atlanta's Grady Memorial Hospital in respiratory isolation.

The other passengers on the flights are not considered at high risk of infection because tests indicated the amount of TB bacteria in the man was low. [The American taxpayer should not be liable for any testing and treatment expenses. He should sue don the ground of stupidity and made to pay restitution.]

After the CDC told him he couldn't fly aboard commercial airliners, "I thought to myself: You're nuts. I wasn't going to do that. They told me I had been put on the no-fly list and my passport was flagged," the man said. So he decided to sneak back into the U.S.

"I'm a very well-educated, successful, intelligent person," he told the paper. "This is insane to me that I have an armed guard outside my door when I've cooperated with everything other than the whole solitary-confinement-in-Italy thing." [Yes, there actually are people out there that are this clueless.]
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