The unfettered international and European air traveling of Andrew Speaker, an American lawyer infected with XDR-TB, has once again highlit the need for European and North American authorities to real-time "marry and match" passenger records (PNR). Although Speaker knew that he had the extremely resistant strain of infectious TB and shouldn't be traveling by air, he avoided being intercepted by the US system via a deceptive routing from Italy to Prague and then Prague to Montreal. He then hired a car and crossed the Canadian/US border at Champlain in an attempt to get home. He is now in enforced medical quarantine in Denver - and his new father-in-law, a federal microbiologist, is being investigated for possible complicity in the Speaker evasions. Because Speaker's May 24 flight, on Czech Air Flight 410 from Prague to Montreal, was from an EU member state to Canada, the airline was not required to submit his PNR data to either government. Had his flight terminated in the U.S., the Department of Homeland Security would have had his PNR data and that of anyone else on the flight. The US Center for Disease Control had contacted Italian health authorities to warn of a potential risk. However by that time Speaker had left Italy. In a letter to the European Parliament last month Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff stressed that "PNR data is an incredibly important tool to screen potential criminal, security and even medical risks."  Related Article