He is Andrew Harley Speaker–and what a selfish, reckless man he is.

Update: A strange new twist…Speaker’s father-in-law is a CDC microbiologist who specializes in TB.

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Related: What’s that I hear? The sound of ACLU lawyers on the way.

Related: The government is investigating how Speaker got across the border:

The government is investigating how a globe-trotting tuberculosis patient drove back into the country even after his name was put on a no-fly list provided to border guards. The failure exposed a major gap in a system that is supposed to keep the direst of diseases from crossing borders.

But the communications breakdown at a U.S.-Canada border crossing was only one of a series of missed opportunities to catch the Atlanta man and his wife who seemed determined to elude health officials.

And worried infection specialists say it shows how vulnerable the nation is, from outdated quarantine laws and the speed of international flight, to killer germs carried by travelers. What if, they ask, the now-quarantined man had carried not hard-to-spread tuberculosis but something very contagious like the next super-flu?

“It’s regretful that we weren’t able to stop that,” said Dr. Martin Cetron of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said of how the man fled when U.S. health officials tracked him down in Rome and told him not to get on an airplane.

Should the CDC have asked Italian health authorities to put the man in isolation there? That was under discussion when the CDC learned the man had fled, Cetron said.

“We need to rely on people to do the right thing,” Cetron said, saying the CDC hesitates to invoke its quarantine powers. “Can we improve our systems? Absolutely. There will be many lessons learned from this.”

We’ll see.

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