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Report: TB patient maintains he is married

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DENVER, Colorado (CNN) -- Rejecting earlier claims made by a local Greek official, tuberculosis patient Andrew Speaker said he did marry his fiancee in a small Greek town during his trans-Atlantic trip.

"I know we went over and had a ceremony and that local officials (in Greece) had me sign all these documents. I know we exchanged rings," said the 31-year-old Atlanta attorney in a Newsweek magazine interview conducted on late Friday.

Speaker recently traveled from the United States to Europe with a dangerous form of tuberculosis.

Speaker's comments followed an earlier statement by Mayor Angelos Roussos of Santorini, Greece -- where the couple were believed to have recently wed -- that there had been no wedding at all.

Roussos said a clerk from the municipality office informed him that Speaker and his fiancee, Sarah Cooksey, did not have the necessary paperwork for a civil marriage.

"He made no previous contact with the town hall about arranging a civil marriage," Roussos said. "So the wedding never happened. He stayed instead at a hotel for two days, the Majestic Hotel, before setting back for the United States. It was his first time here."

Speaker balked at the claim.

"If there's some loophole and the local mayor didn't check some box, I don't know. Heck, we've even got the marriage pictures," he said.

A member of the Speaker family provided CNN with a photograph from the wedding ceremony.

Greg Fansler, Speaker's former roommate, said there were documentation problems with the Greek authorities but that the couple held a wedding ceremony anyway and planned to take care of those problems when they returned to the United States.

Fansler said he did not attend the wedding, but visited Speaker at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta before he was transferred to National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver.

The couple's wedding announcement in a Fulton County, Georgia, newspaper in April said, "A May wedding in Santorini, Greece, and an extended honeymoon in Europe are planned."

In an interview on ABC's "Good Morning America," Cooksey referred to Speaker as "my husband."

Speaker, 31, an Atlanta lawyer infected with a rare, often fatal form of tuberculosis, said he has a recording made before the couple flew to Europe that shows health officials told him he was not a risk to others.

In the ABC interview broadcast Friday, Speaker said his father asked health officials whether Speaker was a risk to anyone, and health officials said he was not. "My dad taped it," he said.

Fulton County health officials have said they told Speaker before his trip not to fly. (Watch Speaker say he hopes fellow airline passengers will forgive him )

Asked about the tape, Steve Katkowsky of the Fulton County Health Department told CNN, "If such a recording was made it was without the consent and without the knowledge of Fulton County Health Department officials."

Speaker said that once he was in Italy, officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta informed him that his case was more serious than they had realized.

He had been diagnosed with multiple drug-resistant tuberculosis. But, he was told, final test results found he had an even more rare, extensively drug-resistant form, known as XDR-TB.

Officials told him not to take commercial aircraft home, he said on "Good Morning America."

"I said, 'What changed?' " Speaker related. " 'When I left I was told I wasn't a threat to anyone. When I left I was told I wasn't contagious, what changed? Why are you abandoning me like this and expecting me to turn myself over for an indefinite time? What has changed?' And they did not have an answer for that."

The CDC is tracking down airline passengers who may have come into contact with Speaker. (Watch passengers discuss their frustrations over the TB scare)

The agency has identified about 80 air passengers on two of Speaker's trans-Atlantic flights they believe are most at risk for exposure.

Speaker said he had been told before the beginning of his trip that in order to fight his illness, "I had one shot, and that was going to be in Denver," at the National Jewish Medical and Research Center, which specializes in treating drug-resistant forms of TB. If he was somewhere else and was not given the exact right mixture of drugs, he said, "That was it, they blew my last shot."

Speaker said officials wanted him to check into a treatment center in Rome indefinitely. But he feared that if he did, he might not make it to Denver. "It is a very real threat that I could have died" in Italy, he said.

He flew from Prague to Montreal, apparently in order to sidestep a no-fly order that could have stopped or delayed his return to North America. Once in Canada, Speaker and his wife drove across the border to New York, where he was treated at a hospital before being flown aboard a CDC jet to Atlanta. He was moved to Denver Thursday.

Apologizing to all those now fearing for their own health after having been on airplanes with him, Speaker said, "I just hope they understand that truly in our minds we were told that we were not a threat to the people around us, and we wanted to get home." (Watch Speaker's friends defend him)

"I am very sorry for your fear, and putting you at risk. I don't expect those people to ever forgive me," he said tearfully.

Speaker "still does not appear to be highly infectious," and there is "no indication that his infectiousness has changed in the past few months," CDC Director Dr. Julie Gerberding said Friday.

Asked about remarks by health officials that they had been looking at another option to get him back to the United States from Italy, Speaker responded, "That is a complete lie."

Hiring a private jet would have cost $100,000, which he did not have, Speaker said.

Speaker's wife, Sarah Cooksey, told ABC she had pleaded for any kind of transportation, including a military vessel.

She said her father, who works at the CDC, had tried to help the couple get home.

"Oh he did, everybody did, our entire family, everybody was calling all day," she told ABC.

"I'm praying that nobody else tests positive," she added. "That's something that I don't know that I could ever forgive myself for, if that happened."

The televised interview was the first for Speaker, a personal injury lawyer, since word of his diagnosis sparked international concern. Both he and ABC's Diane Sawyer had their mouths covered by masks, but Cooksey sat beside him with no mask on.

Thinking back on his decision to return to the United States on commercial jets, Speaker said, "In hindsight, maybe it wasn't the best decision."

Lawmaker: 'The system failed'

On Thursday, a senior House member said he wants to know how Speaker got through U.S. Customs and Border Protection even though his passport had been flagged in its computer system.

His passport was checked at the U.S.-Canada border, a Homeland Security official told CNN.

An alert that Speaker should be detained and isolated, and public health officials should be contacted, showed up on the Customs and Border Protection's computers, but he was allowed to cross into the United States at Champlain, New York, anyway, the official said.

Speaker was at the border crossing for less than two minutes. (Watch how patient slipped past authorities )

The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Mississippi, has scheduled a hearing for next week.

"We had two agencies that should have been in constant communication with each other, and obviously the system failed," Thompson said on CNN's "Paula Zahn Now."

People with XDR-TB are resistant to first- and second-line drugs; their treatment options are limited and the disease often proves fatal.

Between 1993 and 2006, 49 people were diagnosed with XDR-TB in the United States, said Dr. Ken Castro, director of the division of TB Elimination at the CDC.

The World Health Organization estimates that there were almost half a million cases of multiple-drug-resistant tuberculosis worldwide in 2004.

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