Some Greyhound bus passengers are not too happy after they say they were forced to share a bus with a very sick passenger. It is believed that the passenger was suffering from tuberculosis.
"We both noticed how sick he was and then he started coughing and hacking up blood," Erin Dent told CBS.
Dent and her fellow passenger, Doreen Krueger, are concerned that they might have been exposed to the disease after riding with the passenger for two days. The women said the sick passenger boarded the bus Los Angeles, California on Saturday. And his condition appeared to worsen as the bus headed east.
"He was coughing and hacking," Krueger said. She added that riders got fed up and asked the bus driver to have the sick passenger removed. According to the company, the driver pulled over and called for an ambulance.
"They stopped in Van Horn and called an ambulance," Kreuger told CBS. "The ambulance said we couldn't test him for TB because it would take 2 days."
After the stop, the passenger was allowed to continue on with the trip as long as he wore a mask over his face, but passengers said the man was deaf and couldn't communicate well.
"Both different drivers said 'Put hands over your mouth or hold this over your mouth,' he would not do it," says Krueger. She and other passengers wanted to get off of the bus but paramedics urged them to stay on.
"I'd already been with him a day and a half," Krueger said. "The ambulance said it wouldn't make any difference if (I had) already been exposed."
Greyhound also allowed new passengers to get on the bus. The passengers were given complaint forms when they reached Dallas, but the passengers are demanding that the company does more.
"If we've been exposed then everybody we come in contact with from now on can be exposed, so we're real concerned about our families," says Dent.
The company says they don't know where the infected passenger is at this time, but they say the man did wear the mask after being told to.
The Dallas County Health and Human Services is offering free TB tests to anyone who thinks they may have been infected on the bus.
This article is copyrighted by Travelers Today, the travel news leader
