Oh you know I just can’t not share some more general info to keep you informed. Light reading before bed! Nite Nite!!! (Don’t have time to read the whole thing? Scroll down to the highlights!)
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PAULA ZAHN NOW
Interview With Secretary of Health and Human Services Mike Leavitt; Will Harriet Miers’ Faith Change Supreme Court; Mystery Illness In Toronto Nursing Home Kills Several; Scientists Discuss Love At First Sight; Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes Expecting A Child
Aired October 5, 2005 - 20:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: Good evening, everyone. Welcome to a middle of the week here.
Tonight, I want to take a very close look at a threat that could be even more devastating than a terrorist attack, because every single town and city could be at risk.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ZAHN (voice-over): A disease so deadly that, if you get the virus, there’s no cure and there’s a 50/50 chance you’ll die.
GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I’m concerned about what an avian flu outbreak could mean for the United States and the world.
ZAHN: What’s the worst-case scenario and what are we doing to stop it?
Abortion, gay marriage, assisted suicide, and a born-again nominee. Tonight, the controversial question everyone is asking: Will Harriet Miers’ faith change the Supreme Court?
And Hollywood’s hottest couple is about to become a threesome. Can love at first sight survive the first baby?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The deal is, it’s not feeling in love. It’s staying in love.
What do whirlwind romances teach all of us about staying in love?
(END VIDEOTAPE)
ZAHN: So, how scary is this? A disease spreads across the globe and kills 100 million people. Well, it happened 87 years ago with a flu outbreak in 1918, 100 million dead.
That’s a breathtaking number, but here’s one I think is even more frightening. One health official says a global outbreak, a pandemic of avian flu, could kill 150 million people. So far, only about 60 people have died from avian flu, and it hasn’t adapted yet to spread from person to person.
Health officials in Asia are trying to keep it that way by killing thousands upon thousands of birds whenever they suspect there’s a local outbreak. But, today, a scientist who used to preserve tissue and reverse genetics to recreate the deadly 1980 virus — 1918 virus — said there are eerie similarities between that flu strain and avian flu.
And just yesterday, President Bush said the military might have to quarantine whole cities if that flu strikes here. And, last week, the secretary of health said he doesn’t sleep at night because of this threat.
Do we have your attention yet?
Well, senior medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta joins me now with more information.
Always good to see you, Doctor.
What did we learn from this report?
DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, you know, as you said, there are some significant similarities between the 1918 flu virus, which killed some say up to 100 million, and the avian flu virus.
What we’re talking about here specifically is a virus that’s pretty common, but has certain mutations and these changes in the virus. And these changes are important, because one change might make the virus suddenly a significant killer, as has already happened with the avian flu virus, killing, as you say, 50 percent — more than 50 percent of the people that get infected.
Another mutation, the one that hasn’t happened yet, but could happen, is one that makes it more easily transmissible from human to human. You know, Paula, it’s so interesting to sort of look at the science of this. A small just tiny, just microscopic change in the coding in one of these viruses could change it to create a worldwide pandemic. That hasn’t happened yet, but that’s what these scientists have been looking at, Paula.
ZAHN: But you use a very salient word there: could. And I guess we hear these breathtaking numbers and you have got to wonder if someone out there is hyping this or is this something we really need to be concerned about?
GUPTA: Smart people out there are saying that this is being hyped.
And you’re going to hear different things from different people, certainly. But keep in mind a couple of things. These pandemics, which is just a worldwide epidemic, tend to come in cycles. There have been pandemics in the past. Everyone, just about everyone agrees with this point, that we are probably overdue for some sort of pandemic, meaning some virus that the world has never seen before that infects an alarmingly large number of people who have no immunity against it. So, whether it’s this particular virus, the avian flu, or something else later on down the road, who knows, but most people, even the skeptics, agree that it’s probably going to happen. It’s not a question of if anymore, but more a question of when it might happen.
ZAHN: But the skeptics also have to agree with the fact that there seems to be more of a risk that this flu carries than other kinds of flus.
GUPTA: Yes.
You know, what’s so striking about this flu — and, Paula, everyone’s talking about the 1918 flu. That had a 5 percent mortality. That means, out of 100 people, it killed five. This has a 50 percent mortality. That is what has got everyone’s attention. That is an extremely, extremely deadly virus. Even by virus standards, this is very, very deadly.
If it kills — you know, in 1918, that Spanish flu or that particular flu bug, probably everyone in the world breathed that virus in at some point or another. If that happens with avian flu, because it becomes easily transmissible, I mean, it’s mind-boggling, really, Paula.
ZAHN: But let’s talk about what you would do if it actually comes here. We have a severe shortage of a vaccine that people say wouldn’t even be that helpful and then there’s this Tamiflu stuff that’s pretty widely available right now. Would that make any difference?
GUPTA: Yes, well, you know, the Tamiflu had — the hard part about these studies in terms of figuring out whether it’s effective is, in order to study it, you’d have to knowingly expose people to avian flu. And no one is going to do that as part of the study.
So Tamiflu appears to have some benefit in the laboratory. Would it work if it actually needed to work because there was a lot of cases of it? We don’t really know. And, as far as a vaccine goes, Paula, this is — this is kind of sad. We don’t really have an approved vaccine right now. And if this virus were to mutate today, let’s say it was mutating right now, we would have to create a vaccine. That would take six months from now to actually develop. So, it’s just a very slow and arduous process. Preparation is going to be tough.
People talk about quarantines possibly. That might be part of the at least early answer, Paula.
ZAHN: And, of course, we have heard critics of that possibility say it simply won’t work.
GUPTA: Right.
ZAHN: So, we’re going to debate all this a little bit later on in tonight’s show.
Senior medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta, as always, thanks. So, what exactly happens if bird flu goes global and lands here in the United States? Well, it could mean putting the whole country under quarantine city by city and, as President Bush suggested yesterday, having the military enforce them.
Here’s senior Pentagon correspondent Jamie McIntyre.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
JAMIE MCINTYRE, CNN SR. MILITARY AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT (voice- over): Worst case, a mutant strain of avian flu that can be passed from person to person hits America’s biggest city, New York. The president orders active duty and National Guard troops to seal the island of Manhattan, closing the airports, including Newark, JFK and La Guardia, and shutting the city’s numerous bridges and tunnels.
It’s a scenario not unlike the one depicted in the 1995 movie “Outbreak.”
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, “OUTBREAK”)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Your town is being quarantined.
DUSTIN HOFFMAN, ACTOR: We got 19 dead, you got 100 more infected. It’s spreading like a brushfire.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What are you talking about?
HOFFMAN: If one of them’s got it, then 10 of them have got it now.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MCINTYRE: But how practical is the idea that any city, much less one with as many ways in and out as New York, can be sealed by military force?
MICHAEL O’HANLON, BROOKINGS INSTITUTION: How do you possibly limit the flow of people and goods in and out of a city like this? New York needs to have food brought in, it needs to have other things brought in. You need a certain amount of crossing of the perimeter or the city becomes uninhabitable.
MCINTYRE: The reality is these days a quarantine is more likely to attempt to limit movement of infected people by screening passengers at airports, confining sick people to their homes and banning large gatherings of people where the infection can be spread.
What the military brings is the same things it brought to hurricane relief — logistics and manpower, especially medical facilities and the ability to move them quickly and operate without support. Where the issues get thorny is the Hollywood scenario — combat troops strong arming, possibly shooting desperate victims of a natural disaster.
O’HANLON: It would be an ugly thing if we had to use the military. Nobody in the armed forces would relish the thought of imposing some kind of a martial law-like environment on their own fellow citizens, especially on law-abiding citizens who had done nothing criminal.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
MCINTYRE: One serious challenge for — that has to be accounted for in the federal government’s pandemic response plan is protecting the first-responders.
As you pointed out, Paula, there is no proven vaccine for avian flu. That means they have to come up with other ways to protect the people who would be the first ones on the scene of a disaster.
ZAHN: Jamie McIntyre at the Pentagon, thanks so much for that update.
And, by now, you’re probably all wondering the same thing I am. Is the government ready for an avian flu pandemic? An especially important question after what we all have seen following Hurricane Katrina.
We asked senior political correspondent Candy Crowley to find out. The answer is, not by a long shot.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
CANDY CROWLEY, CNN SR. POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The president’s secretary of health and human services doesn’t sleep that well.
MIKE LEAVITT, SECRETARY OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES: We’re not as well prepared for this as we want to be and need to be and will be. We’re moving rapidly, and — now that we can see that this particular influenza could be a threat.
CROWLEY: The gap between what’s needed and what’s there is vast. Where to begin? For starters, vaccine production is not that profitable and the liability risk is high, so even when a dangerous virus is identified, the U.S. does not have the ability to produce enough vaccine.
DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH: The ultimate goal is to build a system so that you can, within a period of time, measured in like six months from the time you get the virus in your hand, make enough vaccine to cover everyone in this country. We are far from there at this point. And it’s going to take years to get there.
CROWLEY: Nor is there anywhere near the stockpiles of medicine the U.S. would need for an avian flu pandemic. It is made by a company in Switzerland.
KIM ELLIOTT, TRUST FOR AMERICA’S HEALTH: There’s one manufacturer. They’re going to fill them on a first-come, first-serve basis, so we’re way down the queue.
CROWLEY: We are backordered.
ELLIOTT: We are backordered. And we — we aren’t even in line for the big orders.
CROWLEY: Up to two million people in the U.S. might need to be hospitalized, many more people than beds. And what happens when a work force is depleted by an estimated 25 percent who are sick or caring for the sick or too scared to go to work? Experts at all levels say there’s no reason to be afraid now, but there is every reason to prepare.
LEAVITT: And we will move forward to a state of preparation that I — will give people comfort, not certainty, but comfort.
CROWLEY (on camera): We don’t have enough vaccine?
ELLIOTT: No.
CROWLEY: We don’t have medication to treat, enough of it to treat…
(CROSSTALK)
ELLIOTT: Yes.
CROWLEY: Our hospitals don’t have enough capacity to treat the number of patients that would come.
ELLIOTT: No.
CROWLEY: Businesses aren’t prepared.
ELLIOTT: That’s right.
CROWLEY: Individual families aren’t prepared.
ELLIOTT: That’s right.
CROWLEY: Why shouldn’t I be afraid?
ELLIOTT: You need to think about being prepared but not panicked.
CROWLEY (voice-over): It may be a while before the secretary of health and human services gets a good night’s sleep.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
ZAHN: That was Candy Crowley reporting for us tonight.
Now, tomorrow, Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt and health experts from all over the world will begin meeting in Washington to talk about the growing threat from avian flu.
And, just a short while ago, I had the chance to speak with Secretary Leavitt about the U.S. government’s ability to deal with a potential outbreak.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
ZAHN: We are hearing staggering numbers about the potential of hundreds of millions of people being infected with this virus, a virus that we know kills about half of the people who contract it. You’re the man in charge of making sure this country is ready for this prospect. Are we?
LEAVITT: No. No, we’re not ready, and nor is any other country on the planet. This is something that requires substantially more attention than it has been given anywhere, and we’re now beginning to prepare rapidly.
Now, fortunately, much of the preparation necessary for a pandemic is common to other medical emergencies. And, so, we’re not starting from scratch, but we have a long ways to go before we’re ready.
ZAHN: If there were to be a suspected case of avian flu, what is the first thing that you would do?
LEAVITT: We would first try to contain it, wherever we found it.
The likelihood is, we would find it in the Far East somewhere. And then the United States and our friends and allies around the world would join together to say to that country, let us help you. And we’d do everything we could to contain it there.
If we were unsuccessful, we’d then begin to protect the borders of the United States in every legitimate, reasonable way to see if we could keep it from coming here. If it then arrived, we would do all we could to contain it in place. And we’d begin other preparations to assure that, if it — if we weren’t successful, that there would be means of being able to limit its damage.
ZAHN: When you talk about containing it, you know that a lot of health officials out there are saying a quarantine isn’t the answer. It simply won’t work. Your response to that?
LEAVITT: Well, it’s one of the basics of public health. And there have been incidences where it has worked. And it’s — if it doesn’t work completely, at least it slows it down and allows the rest of our preparation to catch up.
ZAHN: The truth is, you can’t really prepare for that eventuality, because you don’t know how the virus will present itself. So, is there any way ever to truly get out in front of this and find a vaccine that would simply prevent this?
LEAVITT: Well, actually, once we have identified a victim or some way of being able to get ahold of the virus, our scientists at CDC and at the National Institute of Health are very adept at being able to develop a vaccine that will, in fact, prevent it. That’s the case with the avian flu. We have a vaccine. What we lack in this country now is the capacity to manufacture the vaccine in sufficient doses in a short enough time frame to meet the need.
ZAHN: Final tonight, Secretary Leavitt, you have so many health concerns you have to worry about in this country. Where does this avian flu fit in on a scale of one to 10?
LEAVITT: I would have to say that it is our highest public health priority right now, the certainty — the probability that the H5N1, or avian flu, will be the culprit that brings the next pandemic, it’s hard to know.
But the trouble — the signs are troubling. And so, we’re responding to it. We need to begin to think about the unthinkable, because, as we learned in Katrina, sometimes, the unthinkable happens.
ZAHN: Secretary Leavitt, thank you for your candor tonight.
LEAVITT: Thank you.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
ZAHN: And, in just a minute, I want to take you to the remote jungles where bird flu first got started. Who’s already dying and what are their countries doing to fight it? And can they keep it from spreading here to the U.S.?
Please stay with us. We have got a whole lot ahead.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
CAROL LIN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): As CNN celebrates its 25th anniversary, editors at Fortune magazine compiled to the top trends that are shaping our future. Artificial limbs were once often ill-fitting clumsy and lack aesthetic and functionality. While modern prosthetics are lighter, stronger and more lifelike, breakthroughs in genetic research and medical technology are opening a brave new world for those in need.
DAVID KIRKPATRICK, SR. EDITOR, FORTUNE MAGAZINE: So there will be multiple ways to grow new body parts using your own personal chemistry, that can be either surgically attached or perhaps literally grown out of your own body. If they can regrow a limb in a mouse today, it could very be possible even in less than 10 years that we could be regrowing body parts on our own bodies.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
ZAHN: We’re talking a lot tonight about the threat of avian flu. Right now, the U.S. doesn’t have enough vaccine, medicine or hospital beds to even deal with a catastrophic outbreak of avian flu, a disease that some people say could kill 150 million people all over the world. So far, however, the disease remains in Asia, and people only seem to be getting it for coming into contact with infected birds.
Senior Asia correspondent Mike Chinoy traveled to one of the many places where avian flu lives and breeds.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
MIKE CHINOY, CNN SENIOR ASIA CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): It’s so remote, it doesn’t have a name. We had to take a dug-out canoe to reach village number four in Thanh Dong (ph) District of Southern Vietnam’s Long An Province.
And it was here we found 39-year-old To Thi Hoang, weeping over the grave of her 10-year-old daughter, Vothi Hoang (ph), one of the latest victims of avian influenza, bird flu.
“She kept telling me she was having breathing problems,” says To Thi Hoang. “She was crying and saying, I’m so tired. I feel like I’m going to die.” And after eight days at the Ho Chi Minh City Children’s Hospital, she died.
This is a family of simple rice farmers raising a few chickens on the side. A few days before Vothi Hoang got sick, the family’s chickens died. They didn’t know why, but doctors later confirmed it was bird flu, and, somehow, the little girl had been infected.
(on camera): It’s in villages like this, where people live in close proximity to poultry and other animals, that virtually all the human cases of avian flu in Vietnam have occurred, precisely the setting, experts fear, where the virus could mutate into a form that spreads easily among humans, with devastating consequences.
(voice-over): Aware of the danger, Vietnam has now banned the raising of all water fowl, like ducks and geese, which can carry the virus without showing symptoms, and ordered the slaughter of all 200,000 ducks in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, despite the economic loss to thousands of poultry farmers.
But even these harsh steps may not be enough. The government in Hanoi has appealed for help from foreign scientists and for supplies of medical and lab equipment. Although the outbreak is most severe in Vietnam, cases of bird flu with human fatalities have been reported recently in Thailand and Cambodia. And the disease has appeared previously in China, Hong Kong and other countries in the region.
Dr. Hans Troedsson is the World Health Organization’s man in Vietnam. He’s well aware of that what means.
HANS TROEDSSON, WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION: We would see millions of people dying. And we will have a pandemic that would shut down societies and communities. And conservative estimation says — it’s saying maybe five to seven million deaths. That’s conservative. We could be up to 50 or 100 million deaths.
CHINOY: It hasn’t happened yet, but throughout Southeast Asia, the virus has become endemic among poultry, especially in Vietnam. And, even though transmission to humans remains relatively rare so far, the disease has already killed dozens of people.
In the village where 10-year-old Vothi Hoang died, the provincial preventive medicine chief, Ngo Van Hoang, visits the locals. His message, be careful. Eating healthy chickens is OK, but don’t cook chickens that have gotten sick and died. And don’t throw carcasses into the river.
“There is some advice and education we have to have a community understand,” he says. “They shouldn’t do these kinds of things.’
It’s an uphill struggle with enormous stakes to ensure that what happened to Vothi Hoang remains a tragic, but isolated episode, and not the start of a global public health disaster.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
CHINOY: Paula, while Vietnam has been ground zero for this outbreak for most of the past year, the disease has now spread to Indonesia, which is more than three times as big, a vast archipelago, thousands of islands, much harder to track. Seven people have died there, one just last week. And public health officials, already anxious, are increasingly worried — Paula.
ZAHN: So, in the end, Mike, how forthcoming or honest are any of these governments in the region about the potential spread of this flu?
CHINOY: Most governments have been pretty honest. They realize what’s at stake. There’s a lot of cooperative effort in the region with the World Health Organization. There have been some concerns, though, about China. The Chinese hid the SARS epidemic initially.
And, last summer, there were reports of a mysterious outbreak in northwestern China, where the Chinese basically closed the area down and prevented any information getting out. A researcher here in Hong Kong was able to surreptitiously get samples, which proved that it was avian flu. So, there is some concern that China, with its authoritarian political system, could be a problem if the disease begins to spread among humans there.
ZAHN: Mike Chinoy, thank you so much.
And joining me now, John Barry, author of “The Great Influenza,” the flu outbreak in 1918 that killed 100 million people, it’s believed, all over the world, and Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University.
Good to have both of you with us tonight.
(CROSSTALK)
ZAHN: So, John, we just mentioned that staggering number. And it’s hard to prove. You see estimates of anywhere from 30 million to 100 million people. That seems unimaginable to grasp. Paint a picture for us of how quickly the flu spread.
JOHN BARRY, AUTHOR, “THE GREAT INFLUENZA”: Well, like any influenza, it was explosive.
All influenza viruses are bird viruses. And throughout history, three to four times a century, a new bird virus will jump to people. And whenever that happens, you have a pandemic; 1918 was lethal. But many of your viewers and myself lived through the 1968 pandemic and probably didn’t even know there was one, so it’s not automatically lethal, but it did spread explosively.
It will — it will sicken between 15 percent and 40 percent of the population.
ZAHN: So, do those factors exist today that could allow that same kind of thing to happen with avian flu?
BARRY: Oh, certainly, without any doubt. If anything, it moves more quickly because of air travel.
ZAHN: And, Dr. Redlener, the one thing that we just heard Mike Leavitt, the HHS secretary, says, is, we are not prepared for this. Why aren’t we?
DR. IRWIN REDLENER, NATIONAL CENTER FOR DISASTER PREPAREDNESS: Well, there’s three factors, really that have been determinative here in why we’re not prepared.
The first is that it’s taken us a long time to develop the technologies that allow for very rapid development of the vaccine once the virus is identified. So, there’s a big lag time between the identification of the actual virus and then the — then when we can get a supply of vaccine that’s — that’s reasonable.
The second thing is, we put ourselves in this horrible position where we didn’t think about ordering the antiviral medication, what people refer to as Tamiflu, until very, very late, after many other countries had already ordered it. And we had a backlog of a hundred — I mean, a billion doses already on order at Roche, the only company that makes it. So, we’re just in line now. And I doubt that we are going to get even what we wanted.
ZAHN: But not a sure-shot cure, anyway.
REDLENER: Not a sure-shot cure, but…
ZAHN: But they’re saying one of two treatment that works.
REDLENER: Right.
And then the third factor, of course, is that the whole health and public health system in the United States is just completely not ready to handle any kind of massive number of victims who get sick and really sick from flu.
ZAHN: John, the secretary also said that, on a scale of one to 10, this is a 10, that it is indeed this country’s highest public health concern today. Why now?
BARRY: Why now?
Obviously, because — well, let’s put it this way. Between 1957 and 19 — excuse me, 1968 and 1997, there were two known occurrences where a bird virus infected a person. Neither of them were fatal. Between 1997 and today, three different viruses have infected roughly 300 people, and two of those viruses have killed people.
So, you know, the odds are — again, there’s a pandemic three, four times a century. We haven’t had one in almost 40 years. It’s just — you know, chance suggests that we’re due for one.
ZAHN: Sure. You can crunch these statistics and interpret it that way.
(CROSSTALK)
ZAHN: But you have critics of this administration saying they’re much hyping this right now.
Dr. Redlener, what do you think?
REDLENER: Well, the problem is, we just came off a disastrous response to a major natural catastrophe in Katrina and then Rita in the evacuation efforts that we saw.
So, I think there’s definitely political issues in terms of how the administration was perceived, how competent we looked at a country. And I’m sure there’s a lot of panic within the White House and the administration about not wanting to be caught ill-prepared again. But, unfortunately, there’s very little we could do about that at this point.
ZAHN: When could it potentially hit here, any day? Are you talking about six months? What are we talking about?
REDLENER: Well, it’s just really hard to say. We just don’t know when that virus will mutate, so it’s able to be transmitted among people, as opposed to just from, say, poultry to a person or a bird to a person.
So, it could happen this year; it could happen two years from now, five years from now. But I think it’s pretty inevitable, just because of the frequency of this, as John was saying, that it’s going to occur. Just, it’s not clear when.
ZAHN: So frightening.
(CROSSTALK)
BARRY: Could I say…
ZAHN: Yes. Please jump in, John.
BARRY: In terms of the administration’s actions — I’m a Democrat, but the fact is, this has been on the administration’s agenda since 2001, before September 11. They were paying close attention to it before Katrina and planning initiatives and had vastly expanded it. So, on this one issue, I’m not particularly cynical about their motives.
ZAHN: You don’t seem so convinced, Dr. Redlener, that that isn’t…
REDLENER: I’m not so convinced.
ZAHN: … politically motivated.
(CROSSTALK)
REDLENER: There were people in the administration, as John says, that were very interested in this. It didn’t reach the White House’s level of attention as it is until very, very recently.
ZAHN: Well, we appreciate your both educating us tonight.
Dr. Irwin Redlener and John Barry, thank you, again.
REDLENER: Thank you.
So you do realize since its 
