So, remember back in May how the U.S. government launched an international manhunt to find a lawyer with multi-drug resistant tuberculosis that had gone to Greece to get married? And, um, fucked it up utterly? Did you ever hear about how no one caught TB from him? Good times. Well, it also turned out that there was another guy with MDR TB at the same time and, um, the government was just a little bit quieter about him.

Mexican businessman Amado Isidro Armendariz Amaya has MDR-TB, and the federal government knew back in April (before Andrew Speaker ever had his picture plastered over CNN). But, when the CBP entered his name into the system as someone to stop at the border on April 16th, they used the wrong birthday and no one stopped him. When someone noticed the birthday was wrong and fixed it on April 20th, they transposed his last names. It wasn't until a Texas doctor working in a clinic in Ciudad Juarez asked him to turn in his border card and stop traveling at the end of May that he finally did so (since, apparently, no one else had previously bothered to tell him anything). On June 1st, DHS finally added Armendariz's name to the do-not-fly list.

All told, Armendariz entered the U.S. 21 times in April and May, including on airplanes. Now that he knows that it's a problem, he's cooperating. Of course, maybe if someone had told him what was what back in April rather than typing his name into the computer for some border control jockey to maybe read, he might've been cooperating then, too. But, obviously, it's silly to tell us what's going on when they can just make law enforcement make us stop doing it.

Frequent U.S. Visits By TB Patient Noted [Washington Post]