Return to Transcripts main page

American Morning

U.S. Authorities Seize Shipment of Fake Tamiflu; U.S. Possibly Looking for New Way to Carry Cuba Away From Communism

Aired December 20, 2005 - 08:33   ET

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

SOLEDAD O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Here's a warning for people who are desperate for flu medication. U.S. authorities seized a shipment of fake medicine, and it was labeled generic Tamiflu. In reality, though, it's what you might call the snake oil of the bird flu scare.
Joining us this morning is the FDA enforcement chief, David Elder.

It's nice to see you. Thanks for talking with us.

DAVID ELDER, FDA ENFORCEMENT DIR.: Good morning. It's good to be here.

O'BRIEN: Thank you very much.

Are you surprised by this haul?

ELDER: No. FDA anticipated this as the threat of bird flu emerged as a public-health concern. FDA anticipated the likelihood that we would see counterfeit products, as well as fraudulent products, and lo and behold, both of those predictions have come through at this point.

O'BRIEN: I guess it's because the money in it is so huge. What's the budget like? What's the market like?

ELDER: Well, certainly FDA is concerned that people are out there trying to prey on the concerns of the American public, and seek the profit from the heightened concerns in this country right now.

The market could be very big. But FDA is going to stay vigilant and work with our law-enforcement partners to take action whenever we see anything like this. We're going to stay vigilant monitoring, communicating with the public to the extent is will allow the public to make informed health decisions, and we're going to take actions whenever this threat arises in this country.

O'BRIEN: In this specific case, what tipped off inspectors? What was the red flag for these 50 shipments that they were inspecting?

ELDER: Well, our law-enforcement partners, with customs and border protections, did a fantastic job identifying this product, recognizing it as a threat, and sharing the information with FDA, that enabled us to get the product, conduct an analysis and determine the product that was seized was not Tamiflu. It did not contain the active ingredient in Tamiflu. In fact it...

O'BRIEN: What is it?

ELDER: Well, it just contains some inert ingredients. The analysis is ongoing. And when we get those results finalized, we'll share them. At this point in time, it looks like some ingredients that might be Vitamin C, and some other ingredients that don't protect a direct harm, but anybody purchasing this product that think they're getting Tamiflu and will get the benefits of Tamiflu are mistaken.

O'BRIEN: Have you been able to trace these 50 shipments back to any particular group or person?

ELDER: Well, that part of the investigation is at the early stages, and it's ongoing, but we will investigate. We'll work with our partners in international law enforcement to take the investigation wherever it leads, and hopefully, we can get to the source of this counterfeit product.

O'BRIEN: If you expected it, and if there is so much money in it, do you expect that this just a tip of the iceberg? You are going to see many more shipments try to make its way into the country labeled generic Tamiflu or labeled something else?

ELDER: Well, it's possible. We want to stay on top of it. Our surveillance is active. We're monitoring every day. And through the heightened awareness in this country, at both law enforcement and with the consuming public, we're hoping that you can stay ahead of the curve, but certainly any person who has a product that comes in as generic Tamiflu should immediately have a red flag, because that is no generic Tamiflu available in this country.

O'BRIEN: What should the consuming public do? I mean, is this something that you would have gotten from your pharmacist, or is this something that would have been ordered online, if you're a person who buys medication on online?

ELDER: These particular products appear to have been purchased online. But the U.S. drug system, the U.S. drug supply, is the safest in the world, and FDA is going to stay vigilant to keep it that way.

O'BRIEN: David Elder is the director of the FDA enforcement. Thanks for talking with us this morning. Certainly troubling news. Appreciate it --Rick.

ELDER: My pleasure. Thank you.

RICK SANCHEZ, CNN ANCHOR: Here is a question for you: How long can Fidel Castro last in power? The U.S. possibly looking for a new way to carry Cuba away from communism at some point. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice chairing a meeting Monday, and according to Rice, the commission was reconvened to -- and we quote here -- "to help Cubans hasten the day they will be free from oppression and to develop a concise, but flexible strategic plan that will help the Cuban people move rapidly toward free and fair democratic elections." With that on the table, Havana bureau Lucia Newman is joining us now by phone from Cuba. Lucia, expect some kind of reaction from the Cuban government on this?

LUCIA NEWMAN, CNN HAVANA BUREAU CHIEF: Good morning, Rick.

Well, there may or may not be. There has been no official response to the secretary of state's meeting yet, but the reaction, which is very predictable; every time this transition plan as it's called is mentioned, the Cuban government, and particularly President Fidel Castro sees red. Now they call this clear-out intervention, proof that the United States wants to run this country now, and even after President Fidel Castro is gone. In fact, they constantly tell the Cuban people they will lose their rights, such as free education and free services if this plan is implemented. And in fact, they scorn the plan, even with cartoons, saying that there is no need for a transition plan, because after Castro dies, there will no transition except to more socialism. That's the official line, Rick.

SANCHEZ: But given the fact that so many Cubans each year try and make that trek across the Florida Straits and come to the United States, you would think some of them might actually welcome that, wouldn't they?

NEWMAN: Well, most people haven't read. This is a very, very thick plan, let we tell you. But the only thing they know about it, and I'm talking here about the majority of Cubans, is what the Cuban government has told them. But even then, the mandate is to identify ways to hasten the downfall of Cuban communism. For some people, that may sound like music to their ears. For others, it might smack of intervention, even of military intervention, so there isn't really very much information here about the plan.

SANCHEZ: And how's Castro's health, by the way, real quick?

NEWMAN: He seems to be all right. I'm not a doctor, but the last time the CIA said that he had Parkinson's, he stood up and spoke for six hours without stopping, without even taking a potty break, and he talks very fast and for a long, long time. So if he's sick, he's certainly trying to hide it.

SANCHEZ: Lucia Newman, joining us by phone from Havana, we thanks you for that update.

(WEATHER REPORT)

O'BRIEN: Andy is "Minding Your Business" just ahead on AMERICAN MORNING.

What have you got for us?

ANDY SERWER, "FORTUNE" MAGAZINE: Soledad, how would you like to work for a company where if you smoked a cigarette, even at home, you'd be fired? We'll tell you about that, next on AMERICAN MORNING.

SANCHEZ: Wow. (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

O'BRIEN: Coming up tomorrow on AMERICAN MORNING, wedding bells will be ringing for Sir Elton John and his longtime partner, David Furnish. The two are taking advantage of a new law, which recognizes gay partnerships in Britain. We're going to be there live outside the ceremony, along with about two kagillion Elton John fans. That's tomorrow morning on AMERICAN MORNING. We begin at 6:00 a.m.

Business news now. The job or another cigarette? It could come down to a choice of the two. Andy is "Minding Your Business."

SERWER: Soledad, yes. You remember earlier this year there was a small company in Michigan called WACO that tried to do this, and did do it actually. They fired four workers for smoking, but that was a very small health-benefits company. Now we're talking about a much larger company, Scotts Miracle-Gro, which is that bit lawn-care company based in Marysville, Ohio, which makes Miracle-Gro and other lawn-care products.

Fifty-three hundred employees in the United States will now have to stop smoking, not smoke, or they could lose their jobs. This is the new policy, and the company is going to put it into effect starting next fall. They're going to be offering nicotine patches. They're going to offering classes, counseling, therapy and all of the rest to help employees who smoke.

Obviously what's going on here, it's all about medical costs. The company says its medical costs are too high, in part, because of cigarette smokers, and it wants to make sure that it doesn't employ any. It's as simple as that. Now, can it do this legally? Well, in 21 states apparently there are precedents where it can do that. Other states it's unclear. There will be court cases here no doubt here.

O'BRIEN: Yes, because you got the whole slippery-slope question. OK, does that mean people who are 40 pounds overweight either have to lose the weight or get fired, and anybody who's living with a smoker, because that's second-hand smoke, high risk there.

SANCHEZ: Eating fat, drinking alcohol.

SERWER: Right, alcohol-free company. And of course how about verifying that you don't smoke at home? I mean, it's simple enough to verify that you don't smoke at work. But what are they going to do, have monitors in people's homes, have people spot-check people at home, have a visit from the CEO?

O'BRIEN: But I'm sure they can point to a bottom line where it's costing them some serious money in health care costs.

SERWER: Yes, right.

O'BRIEN: It's kind of an interesting question.

SANCHEZ: Be tough to find a judge who agreed with them on that, yes.. O'BRIEN: And who knows, if they can do that, I bet you'll have a number of companies following suit.

SERWER: Yes, I think you're weight.

Unless the CEO's smoke, and drink and are overweight.

SANCHEZ: No!

SERWER: There are some of them like that, too?

SANCHEZ: Really?

O'BRIEN: Thanks, Andy.

SERWER: You're welcome.

SANCHEZ: Still to come, popular Web sites that let kids post information about themselves. While it's fun for the teens to chat, it could make them targets for predators. That's the issue. What parents need to know, next on AMERICAN MORNING.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SANCHEZ: This morning, we're talking about the safety of your kids on the Internet. On the information superhighway, teenagers are really in the fast lane, spending hours and hours online sometimes, unsupervised.

And in many cases, revealing personal information with no idea who could be looking at this information about them.

Here's AMERICAN MORNING's Dan Lothian.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Hello? I know. This is Stacy (ph).

DAN LOTHIAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): When 14-year-old Stacy Yahoo signed up for a popular teen Web site.

STACY YANOFSKY, USED TEEN WEB SITE: You can put on your interests. You can put on your pictures. You can put on your pictures, things like that.

LOTHIAN: She never imagined her innocent adventure could actually be dangerous.

YANOFSKY: It wasn't just I was going along with the crowd, I just -- I thought it sounded cool, because everyone else, like, They had fun with it.

LOTHIAN: Her classmates at this suburban Boston middle school were creating personal pages on MySpace.com, a trendy social network popular with millions of teens nationwide, where anyone claiming to be at least 14 can blog, chat and post pictures. Sounds innocent enough, except...

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They were identifying themselves as what school they went, they were identifying themselves as what town they lived in, they had their pictures posted there. And they were talking about what grade they had been in.

LOTHIAN: Even though the site explicitly warns against that. More disturbing, he says, some pictures were like these, provocative. And school computers were being used to logon. Concerned that predators could find easy targets, Ben Hutton (ph) sent out a warning letter to parents.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: When Stacy came home from school that day, I asked her about it and she told me please don't be angry with me, Mom, I was one of the kids that had a MySpace. And she told me what she had put on and that she was taking it off.

LOTHIAN: Stacy says unlike some of her friends, she only posted sketches and non-identifiable information.

YANOFSKY: I really didn't think about the dangers of being -- of posting something online.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: That's a fear of every parent, that your kid will get in trouble because they are too innocent.

LOTHIAN: Like the case of a 16-year-old Port Washington, New York girl, allegedly molested in September by a 37-year-old man police say tracked her from the site.

(on camera): From coast to coast, several other schools are sending home warning letters and some are taking extreme measures, like threatening suspension for students caught posting personal pages on the site.

(voice-over): Or other sites popular with teens. But young bloggers say the danger is overblown and that it's a great place to keep in touch and to spread the latest gossip. Some parents like Phoebe Rambler (ph), whose home computer is right next to her 16-year- old daughter's, aren't pulling the plug.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: She has reassured me and I feel confident because I have a presence there that she is utilizing it in a safe way.

LOTHIAN: Stacy, however, decided to pull her page.

YANOFSKY: Because it's just so putting yourself out there and risking all these things, like the chance of something happening.

LOTHIAN: A chance the Yanofskys aren't willing to take.

Dan Lothian, CNN, Boston.

(END VIDEOTAPE) SANCHEZ: Now, we've talked to MySpace. They told CNN that it takes the safety of its users very seriously, saying, quote, "When we are alerted to inappropriate content on the site or any underaged user, MySpace reacts quickly to users, schools or parents to take appropriate actions, such as removing the material if it's in violation of our terms of agreement or deleting the user profile."

Let's talk some more about this. And to do this, let's go to Sherry Turkle, professor of science technology and society at MIT. She joins us now. First of all, Ms. Turkle, thanks so much for being with us.

SHERRY TURKLE, PROF. SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY: Pleasure.

SANCHEZ: How big a problem is this?

TURKLE: It's a big problem. 20 percent of teen users post their e-mail online. That's the problem. The problem is that these are early days of medium and we have not yet educated our children about how to protect themselves.

SANCHEZ: OK, help us do that, then. How do we educate them? I imagine one of the first things is you can't just let them be on the Internet unsupervised for long periods of time, right?

TURKLE: Well, I think that a parent needs to know where their child is physically and they need to know where their child is virtually. I love in your story the mother who has her computer next to her child's.

Last night when I was contacted about this story, I went online with my daughter, who's 14. I showed her MySpace. We talked about it. This is what needs to happen. Parents need to be the ones showing their children these sites and talking to them about the dangers.

SANCHEZ: It's easy maybe for you and I, since we're in a computer literate business, but there's a lot of parents out there where the children know a lot more about the computers than they do, and they're a little uncomfortable going there.

TURKLE: And that's why their children need to show them what's online.

SANCHEZ: I get it.

TURKLE: To tell your child I'm innocent, I've heard about these places. I need to -- we need to get educated together.

SANCHEZ: Take me there, Johnny, take me there, Mary.

TURKLE: Take me there. Because I know some rules of the road that you don't.

SANCHEZ: Johnny and Mary ought not to let anybody know anything personal about them, where they live, their identification, their name, correct? That's important.

TURKLE: Absolutely the first rule. Never give away your e-mail. No circumstances, no exceptions.

SANCHEZ: Also, never agree to meet anybody. Right?

TURKLE: Never, never. We have to teach our children that the rules here are just like the rules in a shopping mall. You don't give out your information to strangers you meet in a shopping mall. Children know this. Parents have educated them to know this. And here's a new medium that we need to learn to be safe in.

SANCHEZ: You're right, it's the old don't talk to strangers that we were all told when we were kids.

TURKLE: Absolutely.

SANCHEZ: I imagine there's ways around this, too. Why not build community Web sites in your block or in your school or among friends where everybody does know anybody. That works, right?

TURKLE: Absolutely. I think that's what going to happen and what should happen is that schools and communities of schools, church groups, will start to build intranets, will to start to build communities where children will be safe. And I think that that's an excellent thing to happen because the appeal of these sites is healthy. Children want to post their pictures. Children want to tell their stories. Children want to share their adventures.

SANCHEZ: So give them an avenue to do it with?

TURKLE: Absolutely. The business of adolescence is to play with identity and these spaces are appealing, they're seductive, because they allow children to do that.

SANCHEZ: We're down to 30 seconds, but I think a lot of parents listening to this probably want to know what's age appropriate for children on the Internet. What would you say would be the appropriate age for somebody to be out there chatting with friends on a Web site like this one?

TURKLE: I think that these sites are not good for teenagers. I think that these sites, unsupervised, should not be sites that teenagers are on.

SANCHEZ: So not until you're, what, 18, you're saying then?

TURKLE: I think that that's -- that if you're on these sites, your parent should be involved with you on the site in some way.

SANCHEZ: Good information. Sherri Turkle with MIT, thanks for being with us.

TURKLE: Pleasure.

SANCHEZ: All right. Soledad, back over to you. O'BRIEN: All right, thank you. In a moment, a look at the day's top stories, including a really difficult commuting morning here in New York. Millions of people out in the cold trying to get to work in the very first few hours of the transit strike. We've got a live update just ahead on AMERICAN MORNING. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

O'BRIEN: Good morning. I'm Soledad O'Brien. New York City subway and bus workers are on strike. The nation's largest transit system has come to a grinding halt and just throngs of New Yorkers are walking to work this morning and it's cold. Even Mayor Bloomberg walked to City Hall. Got to a taxi? Good luck. Hope you have a lots of cash, you're going to need it. That story's ahead.

SANCHEZ: I'm Rick Sanchez in for Miles O'Brien. Investigators are on the scene of a plane crash off the Miami coast. So, what went wrong? It's a live report and it's straight ahead.

O'BRIEN: And Vice President Dick Cheney cuts short his trip to the Middle East. We're live at the White House and we're going to tell you why. That's ahead on AMERICAN MORNING.

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com