ATLANTA -- Andrew Speaker, the attorney isolated with a dangerous strain of tuberculosis, practiced law and lived a normal life in Atlanta, knowing he had the disease.

In an exclusive interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer, Speaker said he was diagnosed with TB in January.

For five months since that diagnosis he continued to try cases in courtrooms across metro Atlanta. He ate in local restaurants and attended social events.

Speaker told Sawyer he took no precautions to prevent the spread of tuberculosis to other people in came in contact with. He never wore a mask.

The 31-year old is now in isolation in a Denver hospital.

He is the first infected person to be isolated by the U.S. government since 1963.

The disclosure that the patient is a lawyer -- and specifically a personal injury lawyer -- outraged many people on the Internet and elsewhere. Some travelers who flew on the same planes with Speaker angrily accused him of selfishly putting hundreds of people's lives in danger.

"It's still very scary," 21-year-old Laney Wiggins, one of more than two dozen University of South Carolina-Aiken students who are getting skin tests for TB. "That is an outrageous number of people that he was very reckless with their health. It's not fair. It's selfish."

On Thursday, a tan and healthy-looking Speaker was flown from Atlanta to Denver, accompanied by his wife and federal marshals, to Denver's National Jewish Medical and Research Center, where doctors planned to isolate him and treat him with oral and intravenous antibiotics.

Dr. Charles Daley, chief of the hospital's infectious-disease division, said he is optimistic Speaker can be cured because he is believed to be in the early stages of the disease.

Dr. Gwen Huitt of National Jewish described Speaker as "a young, healthy individual" who is "doing extremely well."

"By conventional methods that we traditionally use in the public health arena ... he would be considered low infectivity at this point in time," she said. "He is not coughing, he is healthy, he does not have a fever."

Doctors hope also to determine where he contracted the disease, which has been found around the world and exists in pockets in Russia and Asia.

Speaker's tuberculosis was discovered when he had a chest X-ray in January for a rib injury, Huitt said.

His care -- which could also include surgery -- could cost between $250,000 to $350,000, she said. The air ambulance flight and other costs of transporting him from Atlanta to Denver on Thursday morning totaled another $12,000, said a spokeswoman for Kaiser Permanente, Speaker's health insurer, which paid the bill.

He will be kept in a special unit with a ventilation system to prevent the escape of germs. "He may not leave that room much for several weeks," hospital spokesman William Allstetter said.

Meanwhile, questions arose as to whether the wedding even took place. The mayor of the island of Santorini in Greece, Angelos Rousso, told The Associated Press: "There was no wedding. They came for a marriage but they did not have the required papers." He said the couple stayed in a hotel for three days and then left.

TB Patient: 'I Never Meant Any Harm'

An Atlanta attorney isolated with a dangerous strain of tuberculosis apologized to his fellow plane passengers in an interview aired Friday, and said he was told he wasn't contagious or a threat to anyone.

"I feel awful," Andrew Speaker said, speaking through a mask with ABC's "Good Morning America" at his hospital room in Denver. "I've lived in this state of constant fear and anxiety and exhaustion for a week now, and to think that someone else is now feeling that, I wouldn't want anyone to feel that way.

"I don't expect those people to ever forgive me. I just hope they understand that I truly never meant them any harm."

Speaker, 31, said he, his doctors and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention all knew he had TB before he flew to Europe for his wedding and honeymoon last month. But he said he was told that he wasn't contagious or a danger to anyone. Officials said they would rather he didn't fly but didn't forbid it, he said.

His father, also a lawyer, taped that meeting, he said.

"My father said, 'OK, now are you saying, prefer not to go on the trip because he's a risk to anybody, or are you simply saying that to cover yourself?' And they said, we have to tell you that to cover ourself, but he's not a risk."

Speaker, his new wife and her 8-year-old daughter were already in Europe for the wedding when the CDC contacted him and told him to turn himself in immediately at a clinic there and not take another commercial flight.

Speaker said he felt as if the CDC had suddenly "abandoned him." He said he believed if he didn't get back to a specialized clinic in Denver, he would die.

"He says he wants everyone to know how he made the decision, why he felt so strongly that it was not endangering anybody else and [is] also asking forgiveness of those onboard who are now having to be tested," Sawyer said after spending an hour with the TB patient and his wife, Sarah Speaker, at the National Jewish Research Center in Denver, where he is currently in isolation.

Speaker, a 31-year-old lawyer from Atlanta, learned he had TB in January. In May, doctors realized his strain, known as XDR-TB, was extensively drug-resistant. He then boarded a commercial flight to Paris May 12, and returned from Europe 12 days later on a flight from Prague, Czech Republic, to Canada.

"He talks at length about the decision first of all to go abroad, to hold his wedding abroad, and … there is a tape recording of the meeting that he had with health officials, and they say it confirms completely their view that it was all right for him to travel," Sawyer said.

Sawyer also toured Speaker's hospital room, which is equipped with a filtration system that pulls air out of the room, and has UV rays to make sure that the room is not contaminated in any way.

From Paris to TB Treatment

May 12, Speaker flew from Atlanta to Paris. On May 18, after flying from Paris to Greece for his wedding and then to Italy for his honeymoon, Speaker received a call from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advising him not to travel.

Despite the warning and a second one from the CDC not to fly on commercial planes, Speaker flew from Prague to Montreal May 24, and drove to the United States. He checked into a New York City hospital May 25. Three days later, he was flown on a CDC plane to Atlanta, where he was placed under government-ordered isolation.

Wednesday, Speaker was flown to the National Jewish Hospital in Denver, which specializes in TB treatment. If drugs fail, he could undergo surgery to remove the diseased tissue. In a press conference, a hospital spokesperson said she was optimistic about the chances of Speaker's recovery.

In a strange twist, Speaker's father-in-law, Bob Cooksey, is a CDC microbiologist specializing in the spread of TB and other bacteria. He said only that he gave Speaker "fatherly advice" when he learned the young man had contracted the disease.

Rare Condition Likely Not Too Contagious

The case of the globe-trotting TB patient has sparked concern all over the world. But while some, especially those who flew with Speaker, worry about potentially contracting the potentially deadly disease, ABC News medical editor Dr. Tim Johnson said the risk of anyone coming down with TB is very low.

"We have learned from the CDC that the risk appears to be low, because the patient is asymptomatic and is not coughing and spewing out germs. He is also smear-negative, which means when you put a sputum sample under a microscope, it is not teeming with bacteria," Johnson said on "Good Morning America." "The risk is not zero, but it is low, which ought to be reassuring."

Johnson explained that Speaker's extensively drug-resistant XDR-TB is very difficult to treat, and its mortality rate can be as high as 50 percent. But, according to Johnson, XDR-TB is also extremely rare.

"There are about 14,000 cases of TB in the United States every year. But there have been only 49 cases of extensively drug-resistant TB reported between 1993 and 2006," he said.

For the medical community, the TB scare should serve as a wake-up call to speed up diagnosis, Johnson said. Though the United States has the technology to diagnose TB rapidly, he doesn't believe enough hospitals have access to it.

"We need to spend more money on solving this problem," he said. "We have really learned a lesson about how to handle these kinds of public health threats, and I worry about what would have happened if this was a more dangerous disease such as SARS or smallpox."