test

WASHINGTON - The globe-trotting tuberculosis patient now in quarantine insisted to Congress on Wednesday that doctors told him he wasn’t contagious and didn’t order him to stay in the United States for treatment — even as health officials painted a picture of a man on the run.

“I didn’t go running off or hide from people. It’s a complete fallacy, it’s a lie,” Andrew Speaker, a 31-year-old Atlanta lawyer, said by telephone from the Denver hospital room where he remains in government-ordered isolation.

But in testimony to a Senate subcommittee, federal and local health officials said Speaker took an international flight two days earlier than planned after he had been told he had a drug-resistant form of TB and should not travel