Well Educated, Just Not Very Smart
I remember when I worked on a software project for a medical diagnostic instrument company. A lab technician gave us a talk about their working conditions, since we were making a tool for them to use. She told us briefly about dealing with highly contagious agents like TB. TB, she told us, was a mycobacteria. In it’s most contagious form she said, she could put a tiny vial of it in the room we were in, with the cap tightly screwed on, and it could nonetheless infect every one of us just sitting there. The mycobacteria were tiny, she said, got out of confinement easily, became easily airborne, and then you breathed them in.
So I’m thinking about this as I read about the guy who has a extensively drug-resistant form of tuberculosis, and exposed dozens of people by flying to the U.S. instead of turning himself in to doctors in Italy like he was told to. Seems he’s a tad puzzled now that he has an armed guard outside the door to his isolation room. After all, he’s a well educated, successful, intelligent person.
The man told the Journal-Constitution he was in Rome during his honeymoon when the CDC notified him of the new tests and told him to turn himself in to Italian authorities to be isolated and be treated. 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.
He told the newspaper he and his wife decided to sneak back into the U.S. through Canada. He said he voluntarily went to a New York hospital, then was flown by the CDC to Atlanta.
…
"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."
Er…that’s why you have an armed guard outside your door buddy. Not merely no remorse for your actions, utterly no clue whatsoever that you did anything wrong by putting your fellow passengers at risk, let alone giving this extremely dangerous new form of TB a chance to spread far and wide beyond you. Fucking airplane cabin. And an international flight. Christ Almighty. And you can’t figure the armed guard. I’d put a dozen of them outside your door. Ones that know how to shoot.
