Man locked up for having TB

[anfield]

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-0...at_N.htm?csp=34

 

By Martin Kasindorf, USA TODAY

A Russian-born man who has been locked in a Phoenix hospital's jail ward since July with highly contagious tuberculosis got some rare good news Wednesday: The sheriff plans to give him back a TV that jailers confiscated in February.

Robert Daniels, 27, otherwise remains in a rare legal limbo. "He's in No Man's Land," Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio says. "He's not charged with a crime, yet he's in a jail."

 

 

ON DEADLINE: Jailers return TV to Daniels

 

A judge ordered Daniels isolated indefinitely as a threat to community health after he disobeyed doctors' instructions to wear a face mask in public, court documents say. TB germs are spread by airborne contact.

 

Daniels could be detained for the rest of his life under his civil commitment if medicine doesn't tame his "extensively drug-resistant" strain of TB, says Robert Blecher, his court-appointed attorney. This most virulent form of TB has only a 30% cure rate and is "virtually untreatable with available drugs," according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

 

FIND MORE STORIES IN: PHOENIX | Maricopa County | Joe Arpaio | Robert Daniels

"I know that I made a mistake by not wearing the mask," Daniels says in a phone interview, "but if you isolate a person, that's already a punishment. They're supposed to treat you for the disease, not put you in jail."

 

Daniels says the jail ward conditions are "awful." He's banned from the communal shower and has to sponge-bathe. A dim light bulb burns in his cell day and night. He praises the hospital food and doctors. "I'm feeling much better," he says. "I'm almost not infectious."

 

Standard drugs render most TB cases non-infectious within two or three weeks, Maricopa County TB control officer Robert England says. Of the 202,436 TB cases reported to the National TB Surveillance System from 1993-2006, 49 were of Daniels' drug-resistant type. Its mutated microbe is a growing problem in Russia, Central Asia, China and India, the World Health Organization says.

 

"If drug-resistant TB begins to spread widely, we gradually step back to the days where we didn't have medication to treat TB effectively," England says.

 

Arizona confines one or two TB patients a year involuntarily because they won't take their medications or obey other orders, England says. He says that "different jurisdictions do things differently" and that Phoenix's choice is to place quarantined patients in the jail ward for security.

 

The CDC says no national statistics are kept on forced confinements. Texas houses 12 court-detained TB patients at a state health facility in San Antonio, says Doug McBride of the state Department of Health Services. None has Daniels' form of TB.

 

Daniels, a construction worker, spent his childhood in Arizona with his American father. He then lived 15 years in Moscow, where he contracted TB two years ago, says his wife, Alla Danielova, who lives in Moscow with their 5-year-old son, Dmitri. Daniels returned to the USA in January 2006 to seek better treatment, he says.

 

After hospitalization, Daniels was sent to a Phoenix residence for indigent patients under a voluntary quarantine, he says. Court documents say he went without a mask to several stores.

 

He broke the rules because "I thought the doctors were overreacting," he says. "I was on medication and had good results."

 

At the Maricopa Medical Center, Daniels is alone in a four-bed cell, ventilated so germs can't escape. Jailers seized his TV, clock radio and phone in February, saying he should be treated like other "inmates." His cellphone was returned to him Tuesday after news reports about his incarceration. Arpaio says the TV will follow.

 

A court hearing is scheduled for April 19 on motions by Blecher to improve conditions of Daniels' confinement.

 

Daniels says he'd wear a mask if authorities would release him ? an outcome Blecher says is unlikely. "I know how serious the situation is," Daniels says. "It's been finally explained to me."

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