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American Morning

New Vaccine Prevents Cervical Cancer; Two New Orleans Hospitals Considered Unsalvageable

Aired October 06, 2005 - 08:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

SOLEDAD O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Welcome back, everybody. Just about half past the hour on this American morning. Coming up, we're going to tell you about a big -- a huge breakthrough in cancer research. We're going to talk to a researcher about this vaccine for cervical cancer. 100 percent effective, is what the studies are showing. And, of course, cervical cancer is just a devastating disease. It is fatal so much of the time.
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: A hundred percent. You got to ask them about that, that 100 percent thing.

S. O'BRIEN: Yes.

M. O'BRIEN: That's pretty amazing.

S. O'BRIEN: It's pretty unusual. Yes.

M. O'BRIEN: Plus, some growing concerns about medical care in New Orleans. A couple major hospitals there -- you remember Charity, of course, University Hospital. So much reporting out of there. They might have to be torn down. What are the implications for the city in that? That's a big story developing there.

S. O'BRIEN: Can the city even afford that?

M. O'BRIEN: Clearly, the state federal funding -- there's going to have to be a lot of bail-outs involved in all of that.

S. O'BRIEN: Some more bad news from there.

M. O'BRIEN: Let's check the headlines, though, right now. Carol Costello in with that. Good morning, Carol.

CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning. Good morning to all of you.

Now in the news, the White House says President Bush will explain the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda in greater detail this morning than he ever has before. The president is due to give what's being billed as a major address on terrorism. CNN will have live coverage of the presidential address. It starts at 10:10 Eastern.

The Food and Drug Administration is reportedly close to approving the sale of milk and meat from cloned animals. According to "The Washington Post," the FDA will soon approve sales of clone-generated animal products. But consumer groups say some Americans may be turned off by the idea of serving cloned meat and milk to their families. They call it quote, "the yuck factor."

Health officials in Canada say the general public is not at a risk due to a mysterious respiratory illness. This despite the deaths of at least 16 people at a home for the elderly in Toronto. More than 30 others remain hospitalized. Officials are stressing that this outbreak is not SARS and that there is no evidence to suggest the outbreak has spread beyond the nursing home.

And seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong is rolling cross country to support cancer research. See, he's still biking, just not competing yet. Armstrong began the 3,300-mile-long Tour of Hope ride a week ago in San Diego. He's joined by hundreds of cancer survivors, researchers and caregivers. The group is expected to ride into Washington on Saturday. And you know, in past years, the Tour of Hope has raised $2 million for cancer research.

S. O'BRIEN: He's a cash cow for cancer research, frankly. I mean with the bracelets -- in all seriousness -- with the bracelets and everything he does, he opens his mouth or rides a bike or makes a plea, cha ching. It's really good news.

M. O'BRIEN: Just a bracelet on the wrist. I mean, how many bracelets has he sold?

COSTELLO: Millions, tens of millions.

M. O'BRIEN: Tens of millions. It's astounding.

S. O'BRIEN: Which is fantastic.

M. O'BRIEN: Good for him.

S. O'BRIEN: Well, you know, let's talk about cancer and cancer research. New information being called the Holy Grail, in fact, of cancer research. It's the first major study of a new vaccine. And they found it was 100 percent effective at blocking the disease that causes cervical cancer.

Joining us from CNN Center in Atlanta is Dr. Kevin Ault. He's a clinical investigator of the study. Good morning. Nice to see you.

KEVIN AULT, EMORY UNIVERSITY: Good morning.

S. O'BRIEN: We're talking about some 20 million people, I think, is the number affected globally by HPV, which is -- I'm going to pronounce this wrong. But human papillomavirus, is that right?

AULT: That is correct.

S. O'BRIEN: I mean, that's the virus -- I mean, gross name, genital warts. But it's what causes, really, cervical cancer, right? Those changes are what causes cervical cancer. So how would the vaccine work?

AULT: Well, there are two diseases, as you alluded to in your opening comments. One is genital warts, which is caused by HPV 6 and 11. These viruses are numbered; 16 and 18 are associated with about 70 percent of cervical cancer. What we found in our abstract that's going to be presented at the Infectious Disease Society of America tomorrow is that we prevented 100 percent of precancerous changes in the women that received the vaccine. And this is a larger trial than what's been published before and has more encouraging results.

S. O'BRIEN: Well, the vaccine only works in the certain strains that are actually the strains that are correlated to cancer.

AULT: The particular data that we are presenting is for 16 and 18, as far as preventing cancer, so yes. It looks like there is type- specific immunity. There are other types that make up a small percentage of these pre-cancerous changes; abnormal pap smears and cervical cancer, you're correct.

S. O'BRIEN: And so when we say that the vaccine is effective for 70 percent of the cervical cancers, it's not effective in the cancers that don't necessarily -- there's 30 percent of which -- of those cancers that it's not really working on, is that right?

AULT: You're correct. There are 30 percent that are not covered. You could speculate that in a second generation of vaccines, you may be able to treat or prevent those with further advances in that. But this particular research is really focused on those four types that I mentioned.

S. O'BRIEN: Oh, great. Thank you for clarifying. Because it's kind of complicated. Now how would the vaccine work? I mean, who -- would you get it at birth, like you get a lot of your vaccines? Would you get it when you're older?

AULT: It is complicated. And most of the research is very new. So it's nice to have this opportunity to talk about it. So the way we did the study was to vaccinate young women and adolescent women. And I think that's probably the appropriate age group for this vaccine. As you may know, there have been some other vaccines that have been approved recently for the adolescent age group. A meningococcal vaccine and a proteases booster vaccine. There are there are other opportunities in an age group of young women to give that vaccine.

S. O'BRIEN: For the 20 million or so people globally who have HPV, does a vaccine work for them sort of after the fact?

AULT: Well, the 20 million is only United States data. You could get up; into hundreds of millions, if you want to talk about global HPV infections. And I think the short answer is no. There's no vaccine that is designed to treat disease that's already established. This is really meant to be a preventative or a prophylactic vaccine. And that's the reason we would give it to adolescents in the future.

S. O'BRIEN: And clearly, it's a huge problem. I didn't realize that 20 million was just here in the United States.

AULT: Just the United States. S. O'BRIEN: Does that mean no more pap smears? I mean, women get pap smears, of course, to figure out if you've got changes in those cells in the cervix, to make sure those aren't cells that are going to become cancerous.

AULT: I am a gynecologist and that question comes up all the time. I think the point to make is that we are talking about maybe a generation or two of women to receive this vaccine before we get to no more pap smears. I guess the best example I could give you would be German measles. You may know that rubella or German measles is associated with birth defects. That vaccine became available in the late 60s in the United States and it was just last year that our colleagues at the CDC reported that there were no cases of congenital rubella in the United States. So, really, we would have to have a long time before we get to that point.

S. O'BRIEN: Well, it's a giant study and some really great news. Thanks for talking with us.

AULT: Thank you.

S. O'BRIEN: Dr. Kevin Ault, thanks for talking with us.

AULT: Thank you.

S. O'BRIEN: Miles?

M. O'BRIEN: The latest casualties of Hurricane Katrina may be two public hospitals in the city of New Orleans. An official there says Charity and University Hospitals are beyond repair and should be demolished.

You're looking at some of the pictures that Dr. Sanjay Gupta and team got in the midst of the darkest moments post-Katrina, where the team there just performed heroic efforts to keep patients alive despite terrible conditions.

Cathi Fontenot, is the medical director of the Medical Center of Louisiana in New Orleans. She oversees Charity and University Hospitals. She was there when some of that footage was shot, and she joins us from New Orleans this morning. Doctor Fontenot, good to have you with us.

CATHI FONTENOT, MED. DIR., MED. CENTER OF LA.: Good morning.

M. O'BRIEN: The hospitals need to be torn down. Why?

FONTENOT: The damage to the hospitals -- you know, we began before even pre-Katrina, the hospitals were becoming old and nearly obsolete. The Charity facility was first used in 1939, was built a couple years earlier than that. The University Hospital was built in the 1960s. We actually, Miles, were in the midst of a planning process for a new facility. The mechanical and electrical systems, the plumbing systems, were getting old, and more and more difficult to keep up every day. So even prior to Katrina, we knew that we were building with -- dealing with some facility challenges. M. O'BRIEN: And a lot of those...

FONTENOT: Katrina coming through...

M. O'BRIEN: A lot of those facilities that you just spoke about, for example, the records and generators, all in the basement, which turned out not to be a good place.

FONTENOT: That's exactly right. Basements in New Orleans are hard to keep dry. We had medical records in the basement. Most of the mechanical and electrical switches were in basements. Both basements at each hospital were flooded, which is the main reason we went without power for so long.

M. O'BRIEN: So the way you put it, then, really Katrina and then Rita to some extent, has hastened what would have happened already. In other words, it's sort of -- to use the medical term -- it's now a DNR, a do not resuscitate for the buildings. Because...

FONTENOT: That's exactly right.

M. O'BRIEN: ... of these storms?

FONTENOT: That's exactly right. That's exactly right. They -- the mold and mildew are unbelievable. There's asbestos in the ceilings of the basement, which now may be pliable (ph). That's the corner. We've had environmental and structural engineers go through both buildings, and they're telling us that they're just beyond repair.

LSU, the LSU system, does have a plan, though, an interim plan. Right now the parish of Orleans is relying heavily on military assets to provide medical care. And as the population returns to the city, we at Charity Hospital will plant our flag and have a plan actually to provide interim care even before a new bricks-and-mortar facility can be built, and decrease our reliance on the military assets that are here, and increase our self-reliance and begin providing care yet again to the people of New Orleans.

M. O'BRIEN: Well, help us understand, because, I mean, the Navy ship Comfort is there, and they can't stay there forever. There will be other needs for it.

FONTENOT: That's correct.

M. O'BRIEN: And as New Orleans tries to move back to some degree of normalcy, you've got to have a hospital. When you say plant a flag, are you talking about setting up a, you know, semipermanent sort of MASH unit?

FONTENOT: Well, right now there is a CASH unit, a combat surgical hospital, at the convention center that is run by the military. Charity Hospital nurses and physicians are supplementing the staff at the U.S. Comfort.

There will be an E-MED tent delivered to the parking lot of University Hospital in the next 24 hours, which we will operate as a small limited ED.

However, our interim plans to get us away from military dependence for health services, we will be opening up clinics. There are a couple buildings that were not heavily damaged during the course of the storm, so that we will have a clinic presence, we hope, in the next two weeks.

An interim hospital plan will consist of some modular buildings that will be up and running, we hope, in the next 30 to 45 days. So we have a plan to get us to a point that we can provide limited care in the next couple of weeks, and then more standard of care in the next month or so.

M. O'BRIEN: But long term, a lot of cost and time to replace those hospitals, obviously?

FONTENOT: Yes. But we will long term need a new facility. As I said, we are more than halfway in the planning. We were at the point of land acquisition and architectural design pre-Katrina. So we are well on our way. We hopefully can get the support from the federal government and a state government to build that facility soon.

M. O'BRIEN: I guess you could literally call it St. Elsewhere.

Cathi Fontenot.

FONTENOT: Yes, Charity in exile.

M. O'BRIEN: Yes, Charity in exile. There you go.

Cathi Fontenot, who is the medical director of Medical Center of Louisiana in New Orleans, thanks for being with us this morning -- Soledad.

S. O'BRIEN: Let's take a look at some live pictures. You're looking at Riverside, California, and this is from our from our affiliate KABC. It's a 6,000-acre wildfire, and it's burning in Riverside County, which is just about 70 miles east of L.A. It's in the Moreno Valley. There are reportedly 700 firefighters on the scene, and the fire is only five percent contained.

We heard not long ago that the weather today is a little windy, which of course is bad news if you're fighting a fire. Tomorrow, though, looks a little bit more promising.

(WEATHER REPORT)

M. O'BRIEN: Still to come on the program why fast food jobs could pay off big for new workers in New Orleans. Andy is "Minding Your Business" with that.

S. O'BRIEN: Plus, we all knew this was going to happen. Golfer Michelle Wie goes pro. She's not even 16. She's making $10 million now a year. Going to find out why this move is really a little more than a formality for her. That's ahead on AMERICAN MORNING. Stay with us. (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

S. O'BRIEN: A little bit of good news for people who are looking for work in New Orleans, for a change from Andy Serwer, who's "Minding Your Business." But sometimes with not the happy news, but good news today. What do you got?

ANDY SERWER, "FORTUNE" MAGAZINE: Good news for low-wage earners. Soledad. A boon for them down in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Basically what's going on there is employees are so scarce in that part of the world, that businesses like fast food restaurants are having to pony up big bucks to get them to go to work. Listen to some of these numbers, Burger King is now paying a $6,000 bounty, paid in monthly installments, if you come to work for them. That's a full- time employee. Part-timers get. $3,000.

Popeye's, the chicken place, used to pay people $5.15 an hour; they're looking to pay people $8.00 to $8.50 an hour. Basically relief workers are getting up to $15 an hour. First, if you work at Popeye's, you're getting a huge raise on an annual basis. You were making like $8,000 to $12,000 a year. Now you're making over $20,000 a year.

People say this job market is going to be tight for years, and that, you know, they're not going to pass this on to consumers. This is a story in the "Times Picayune." But you know, that really is a situation where this is money flowing directly into the pockets of people who need it the most.

S. O'BRIEN: That's good news, but you know, the truth is, there's no place for people to live.

SERWER: I know that's hard, and I think they're going to have these temporary housing deals we've been talking about.

I want to preview the jobs report tomorrow, Soledad, because that's important stuff. It is for the month of September, and obviously it will have the full implications of the two hurricanes. What we're looking at here, this is interesting -- that should be jobs lost. That screen is incorrect. We are looking at 150,000 jobs lost for the month of September, and that would be the first month that we would be losing jobs since May of 2003.

So, you know, if we come in around expectations, won't be bad. But it's really such an unknown because of, you know, obviously the situation down there, counting heads and how many people are filing for unemployment insurance.

S. O'BRIEN: And where are they?

SERWER: And where are they? And you know, how are they going to get benefits. We've been talking about that. But we'll be checking that out tomorrow.

S. O'BRIEN: All right. Andy, thanks -- Miles.

SERWER: You're welcome.

S. O'BRIEN: Miles?

M. O'BRIEN: Thank you very much. You know, we've seen a lot of pictures of damaged homes in New Orleans. There's one story in particular that's near and dear to us at AMERICAN MORNING.

Take a look at this picture. Lovely house, isn't it? Owned by our executive producer and the V.P. of morning programming at CNN, Kim Bondy. This is what it looked like before Katrina hit and the levees broke. Now, last month, remember this scene? Kim and I, along with the 82nd Airborne. And they couldn't have been nicer, by the way. This is a Allegian (ph) Fields Road, her street, as we went down.

And I'm stalling a little bit here. Hopefully they're going to show you a picture of the house, because that's the idea in this. Do we have a house in this shot? There it is, coming up. And there it is under some water. Well, there it was briefly. Guess we could have edited that a little better.

Today Kim is back in New Orleans to take us -- there's the house now, Almost looks like it did pre-Katrina. But it is deceiving, as we've been saying over and over again. Kim has her first chance this morning to take a look downstairs.

Kim, how is it going?

KIM BONDY, CNN PRODUCER: Hi, Miles. Well, as you said, the last time we came here, we came by boat. And I've been here a couple of times, but I didn't have the nerve or the guts to go inside. And so this morning was the first time I went inside. You know, coming up in the next half hour, we're going to take you inside. I'll show you what I found. It's not pretty.

And as you remember, the mayor just opened up this particular zip code just yesterday. So what I'm experiencing is what a hundred thousand other people in this area are also experiencing. And you'll never believe what I discovered upstairs. So we'll show you that in the 9:00 hour.

M. O'BRIEN: Excellent teasing, Kim Bondy. Will never believe you found...

BONDY: I do this for a living!

M. O'BRIEN: Very well done. All right. Back with you shortly -- Soledad.

S. O'BRIEN: We couldn't even walk by that house when we were there. You know, that is tough for her. All right. Well, I want to see what's upstairs.

SERWER: Yep.

S. O'BRIEN: Still to come this morning, while most 15-year-olds are getting ready to get their driver's licenses, Michelle Wie is busy driving golf balls and she's going pro, too. The latest step on her road to super stardom, coming up next on AMERICAN MORNING.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

S. O'BRIEN: She is the girl with the golden swing. Michelle Wie is golf's most celebrated teenager since Tiger Woods and not old enough to drive, unless you're talking about driving a golf ball. The phenom now is a pro.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MICHELLE WIE, PROFESSIONAL GOLFER: You know, the first time I, you know, grabbed a golf club, I knew that I would do it for the rest of my life and I loved it. And, you know, some 12 years later, you know, I'm finally turning pro and I'm so excited.

S. O'BRIEN (voice-over): Just days shy of sweet 16, golfer Michelle Wie is taking her game to the next level. In truth, the decision to turn pro is merely a formality for Wie. She is a tour veteran already, having competed against the world's best players, ladies and men, since she was 12.

At her press conference on Wednesday, she seemed ready to deal with greater expectations.

WIE: More than ever before, I'm just going to practice harder than ever to try to become the best golfer in the world.

S. O'BRIEN: The high school junior is already one of the wealthiest. Wie's endorsement deals with Nike and Sony are said to be worth $10 million. Her first move as pro, to give something back.

WIE: You know, over the last month, so many people have, you know, lost so many things. And it's been really heart-wrenching. And as an American citizen, I felt like it was my duty to donate $500,000 to Hurricane Katrina and every single cent will go to the people.

S. O'BRIEN: Tiger Woods is among Michelle Wie's many fans. Gary Player, one of the game's all-time greats, says the sky's the limit for the golf sensation.

GARY PLAYER, PROFESSIONAL GOLFER: I feel she's got a chance of being an absolute superstar. She's actually a phenomenon, and she could possibly one day get into the Masters and I think that would be just the ultimate.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

S. O'BRIEN: First thing's first, though. First the 16th birthday, and then Wie is scheduled to make her professional debut at the LPGA in Palm Desert, California. Good luck to her.

Today's top stories, straight ahead. We're a little more than an hour away now from what's being called a major speech by President Bush. We're going to have a preview on that, as we continue right here on AMERICAN MORNING. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

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