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Sanjay Gupta MD
Veteran Says Army's Vietnam Era Human Experiments Gave Him Parkinson's; "Human Guinea Pig" Granted V.A. Benefits; MERS Mystery Continues to Unfold
Aired May 18, 2014 - 07:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Tim Josephs was just 18 years old when he joined the U.S. Army. It was the height of the Vietnam War.
TIM JOSEPHS, ARMY VETERAN: Most of my friends were drafted. And I felt a duty to serve.
GUPTA: But shortly after enlisting, Josephs was chosen to participate in a two-month program at Edgewood Arsenal military base in Maryland.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is Edgewood Arsenal, the army's chemical commodities center.
GUPTA: This was the Cold War, and the United States wanted defenses against a possible Soviet chemical attack.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Psychochemical attack may come in the form of an explosion, an invisible vapor, a cloud of smoke. We do not know --
GUPTA: The U.S. was also developing psychochemical weapons of its own.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Here's a group of normal soldiers responding correctly to a series of routine drill commands. After receiving a small dose of LSD, they're confused and undisciplined.
GUPTA: For 20 years, about 7,000 military volunteers took part in testing of some 250 chemical and biological agents.
JOSEPHS: One test, I woke up and demonstrated Parkinson's symptoms. Just -- I couldn't walk. My body shook violently and pain throughout my body. And just a lot of numbness.
GUPTA: Ten years ago, he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease.
JOSEPHS: The symptoms that -- that I felt then are just exactly what's come back to me in the last 10 years.
GUPTA: So, Josephs and other Edgewood vets are suing the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs. In response to a CNN report on Edgewood in 2012, DOD said, "The Department of Defense has made it a priority to identify all service members exposed to chemical and biological substances and the V.A's contacted and offered free medical evaluations to thousands of veterans. But today, Josephs finds himself facing another struggle. His Parkinson's forced him to retire early, and in 2010 he filed a medical claim with the V.A.
JOSEPHS: I have a hard time really dressing myself and traveling. And I have attacks daily of tremors and sometimes breathing difficulty and eating.
GUPTA: Thirteen months later, he was awarded a 40 percent disability rating. That's $602 a month, not even enough to pay for his medications, so he appealed, asking for more. But this February after three years of waiting and unanswered letters, Tim got unwelcome news from the V.A. office in Pittsburgh.
JOSEPHS: I should call back in about four years. That by that time I'd be much closer to my file being looked at. And I was speechless.
GUPTA: That's right. Tim says it would be 2018 before the V.A. could make a decision on his case. I was surprised. But several lawyers we spoke with who handle disability claims say they aren't.
PAUL SULLIVAN, BERGMANN & MOORE LAW FIRM: Many veterans, 275,000 as of this week, are waiting an average of four to five years for an answer on an appealed disability claim. V.A.'s treatment of these veterans is absolutely unacceptable.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
BALDWIN: And here he is joining me now, Tim Josephs with me in Washington.
And, Tim, I mean, just listening to your story and hearing in the piece that the V.A. told you -- sorry, we'll make a decision just -- a decision in four years. Tell me about a phone call you just recently got.
JOSEPHS: I just got a call this morning that my benefits have been increased 50 percent from 40 percent to 80 percent disability rating. And I'd sure like to thank everyone here at CNN for their work. Without your help and intervention, I'd still be in line with 100,000 other vets sort of lost.
BALDWIN: It's incredible. I mean, hats off to Sanjay and his entire medical team for maybe playing a role, but we're so happy for you that you're finally going to get some help. I understand, Tim, you're supposed to have brain surgery, deep brain stimulation to treat your Parkinson's. You've been waiting a while for that.
Do we have a date yet?
JOSEPHS: Well, I was scheduled for mid-July. And it's sort of on hold now. Several new drugs have come out to treat. So, the doctors want to research that venue first, as there's some risk involved with the -- with the brain stimulation surgery. So, they'll try the newer drugs first. And then ultimately I'll most likely have that at some date in the future.
BALDWIN: Well, whether it's the drugs or that, that surgery, we wish you absolutely the best. Tim Josephs, we're thrilled for you that you got that phone call that seemed to turn things around. Tim, thank you so much for sharing your story with us.
JOSEPHS: Again, my sincere thanks to CNN. I really appreciate it.
BALDWIN: You got it.
And now, millions of veterans rely on V.A. hospitals and in many ways, the care is excellent. But it's a tough time. Not just delays on these disability claims but CNN's Drew Griffin broke the story that made so many vets who have been waiting for months and months, even for years, for treatment. And some patients died as a result. Whistle-blowers accuse some V.A. centers of falsifying records, covering it up.
But thanks to that reporting here at CNN, the head of the V.A. had to answer some pretty tough questions on Thursday on Capitol Hill.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SEN. BERNIE SANDERS (I-VT), SENATE VETERANS AFFAIRS COMMITTEE: Is in your judgment based on what you know, are people, quote-unquote, "cooking the books"? Is that, in fact, a problem within the health care system?
ERIC SHINSEKI, SECRETARY OF VETERANS AFFAIRS: I'm not aware. And other than a number of isolated cases where there is evidence of that. But the fact that there is evidence in a couple of cases behooves us to go and take a thorough look.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BALDWIN: And I can promise you CNN will stay on top of this story.
In other news, a disease called Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, has put a lot of people on edge, it kills about a third of known patients. Nearly all of them were infected in Saudi Arabia. But some have flown to the United States.
The CDC and local health officials are tracking down hundreds of people who were on those multiple airplanes with these individuals, and senior medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen has a look behind the scenes.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN SENIOR MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: We're here at the CDC's Emergency Operations Center. It's the nerve center where they're tracking the MERS virus. Off to my right, there are people who are making phone calls to passengers on the plane with the MERS patient in Florida. They want to know, did anyone else get sick?
(voice-over): On this monitor., a map displays the 34 states where the passengers live.
DR. MARTIN CETRON, CDC DIVISION OF GLOBAL MIGRATION & QUARANTINE: We are basically trying to reach everybody. We're administering a short questionnaire that you have here, making sure they're well.
COHEN (on camera): So, what kind of questions are you asking?
CETRON: Have you had a fever? That's a temperature greater than 100.4. Have you had any cough?
COHEN (voice-over): The passengers are likely not sick. They didn't have close and prolonged contact with the MERS patient. Most at risk: family members and health care workers.
That's why this box was rushed here. It contains specimens from health care workers who came in contact with the MERS patient.
(on camera): That box of specimens arrived here at the CDC's viral disease lab. Now, we're not allowed in because this is bio-safety hazard level two and that means no visitors. But all day inside here, they worked on two MERS specimens from Florida.
So, two people fly from the Middle East to the United States and bring MERS here. And look at the response that it generates.
DR. THOMAS FRIEDEN, CDC DIRECTOR: We're all connected. A single plane flight can bring a virus or bacteria from any part of the world to any other part of the world.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
BALDWIN: Elizabeth Cohen with that behind-the-scenes look there.
A couple of things you might notice if you do fly, airports are starting to post signs like this one, a warning about MERS. Basically if you are not on the Arabian Peninsula, you don't have to worry about it. But if you do travel there and within two weeks you start to notice some symptoms like a fever, cough, shortness of breath, don't blow it off. Do tell your doctor. They will make sure that it isn't serious.
Coming up here, one of the more controversial diseases, surprisingly Lyme disease, going places it never has gone before. Sanjay's got the details, up next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
GUPTA: You may have just heard recently, scientists issued this new report on climate change that went to the president and Congress. What caught my eye about this was the predicted impact on human health. For one thing, it says warmer temperatures will mean more mosquitoes and ticks and also more of the illnesses that they carry. You can already see this with Lyme disease. (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
GUPTA (voice-over): Kerry Clark is hunting.
KERRY CLARK, MEDICAL ENTOMOLOGIST: That's how we do it. And, look, there's a tick right there already.
GUPTA: Hunting ticks. Tracing the carriers of Lyme disease.
CLARK: This is not a black-legged tick. It looks almost exactly like a black-legged tick.
GUPTA: Four years ago, he felt a bite.
CLARK: Five days later, I had this strange fatigue and some general malaise, and I had these swollen lymph nodes on the side of my neck.
GUPTA: The diagnosis, Lyme disease.
The Centers for Disease Control estimates that every year there are approximately 300,000 cases. It says 95 percent of those occur in just 13 states, all of them in the Northeast and the Upper Midwest.
DR. PAUL AUWAERTER, JOHNS HOPKINS HOSPITAL: Deer ticks exist in southern states. They don't really bite humans like the northern ones do. So, there may be other factors why even though the deer ticks exist in Southern states and some of them even carry the bacteria that causes Lyme disease, we don't see many cases of human Lyme disease.
GUPTA: But Clark was exploring in Georgia when he was bitten and he says there's plenty of evidence Lyme is not so rare in the South.
CLARK: Over time, it's just kind of being self-reinforced that we don't have it here, it's rare to nonexistent in the South and this sort of thing. And then doctors were educated and indoctrinated into that belief, and so even when they see it, they don't recognize it.
GUPTA: Other experts are starting to agree. Lyme disease is spreading.
RICHARD OSTFELD, DISEASE ECOLOGIST: But Lyme disease does occur in many other states. So, the question is not whether Lyme disease exists in the Southeast or the South Central United States, it certainly does. The question is, how much of a public health problem is it?
GUPTA: Scientists believe the disease will keep moving South, in part because of the changes in climate.
CLARK: They send me my data files.
GUPTA: Clark's doctor put him on a course of antibiotics and his symptoms did go away, but they came back just two months later.
CLARK: One day, I developed a headache, and it was a migraine severity-type headache. It came on immediately, and it stayed for three weeks. I had pressure in my head, neck stiffness and other things like that.
GUPTA: While a majority of patients with Lyme disease see their symptoms go away after an initial course of antibiotics, another 10 percent to 20 percent have symptoms that linger. Some like Clark end up taking antibiotics for months at a time.
AUWAERTER: When carefully studied, where antibiotics long term have been compared to placebo, we don't see any effect.
GUPTA: The CDC told us the lasting symptoms are real, but they're probably due to nerve damage not a lingering infection. But others say that issue isn't settled.
CLARK: We also know from animal models that there are situations when the pathogen, the Lyme bacterium, does persist, so I think that the potential for the Lyme disease pathogen to persist following standard antibiotic treatment is reasonably high, and it probably is occurring in some Lyme disease patients.
GUPTA: Clark is hoping the answer may lie in some of these ticks he's rounding up. That understanding them better could spare patients all over a lot more pain.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
GUPTA: And how to protect yourself from ticks, use insect repellent. When hiking, wear long pants and sleeves and walk in the center of the trail. You know all that, right?
Up next, forget the 10,000-hour rule. How you can learn the basics of any new skill in 20 hours or even less.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
GUPTA: You know, this wildly popular book "Outliers", Malcolm Gladwell makes his case that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at something. Who has that much time on their hands?
You know, we did the math. That's about 1,200 days, about 3 1/2 years and 10,000 hours.
So, we decided to invite Josh Kaufman. He's the author of "The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything Fast."
Good to meet you. Thanks for being on the program.
JOSH KAUFMAN, "THE FIRST 20 HOURS" AUTHOR: Great to meet, too. Thanks for being here.
GUPTA: I love this idea especially as you get older you want to sort of think about learning some new skills maybe and learning things that you wouldn't have otherwise learned earlier in life or you didn't have the time. Where did the 10,000-hour rule come from in the first place?
KAUFMAN: So, the original rule, if you look at the research, came from studies of expert-level performers, so think athletes and professional musicians and chess grand masters. And the question the research was trying to answer is, what does it take to get to the top? What does it take to become the best at something, you know, some ultra-competitive field?
And that research is really interesting. The result was it takes about 10,000 hours over a period of usually about ten years to get there.
And that research is interesting, but it doesn't really answer the question of how do we --
GUPTA: Right.
KAUFMAN: -- get better at something. You know, if you want to pick up something as a hobby or you want to learn something for your work, it doesn't take anywhere close to 10,000 hours to just decide to learn something and sit down and learn it and get the results you want.
GUPTA: How hard is it to just begin? So, the very beginning of this learning curve, deciding you're going to adopt a new skill set.
KAUFMAN: You know, the beginning of the process is actually the most difficult because that's the point we're the most self-conscious about what we can and can't do, and so, you know, at the beginning of the process we're scared. We're intimidated. We may not know where to begin.
But if you just sit down and think through what it is exactly you're trying to do, what do you want to get out of this skill, and then break the skill down into smaller parts, it becomes much easier to practice and then your strategy's really simple. Look at the sub- skills that you're going to need to know and you're going to use most often. Practice those first.
GUPTA: Yes.
KAUFMAN: And you improve very, very quickly in a very short percent of time.
GUPTA: Why the ukulele?
KAUFMAN: Ukulele is so fun. I wanted to learn an instrument that I could play and sing at the same time. I had never played the piano. I never played a stringed instrument.
GUPTA: Didn't know how to read music?
KAUFMAN: Didn't know to read ukulele music. I played trumpet in high school, not a whole lot of transferable skills between the two.
GUPTA: Twenty hours?
KAUFMAN: Twenty hours. I went from never picking up a stringed instrument to playing in front of a group of about 500 people at a performance in 2012. GUPTA: This is very inspiring and now we get to hear you?
KAUFMAN: So, I'll show you how this works. So, I have two young kids at home. And I'm finding myself playing a lot of children's music, which is a great place to start because children's music is both really fun and easy to remember.
GUPTA: Right.
KAUFMAN: It's also really simple so it's a good place to learn how to do this. So, the only thing that you need to know to play children's music, three chords, believe it or not. C, F, and G. OK?
So, if you can do that --
GUPTA: OK.
KAUFMAN: So, think? Twinkle, twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are, right? It's really simple. You can learn how to do that in a couple minutes.
GUPTA: Right.
KAUFMAN: And then the skill becomes learning how to switch between the chords --
GUPTA: Yes.
KAUFMAN: -- to get the song you want.
So you do that and then you just do fancier stuff with your right hand, right? Twinkle, twinkle little star, right?
Then when you get comfortable with that, you do even more fancy stuff. There's something called finger-picking which is instead of strumming them all at the same time you hit individual strings. So -- twinkle, twinkle little star how I wonder what you are it's the same thing. You just need to know how to break it down and practice in a way to make it automatic. And it doesn't take long to do that.
GUPTA: You're a good teacher.
KAUFMAN: Thank you. Appreciate that.
GUPTA: Part of in is people have to be good learners, too, right?
KAUFMAN: Yes.
GUPTA: Can anybody do this?
KAUFMAN: Anybody can do this at any age.
GUPTA: Well, thanks so much --
KAUFMAN: Thanks so much for having me.
GUPTA: I think a lot of people are going to get something out of that. I appreciate it.
KAUFMAN: I appreciate it.
GUPTA: And up next, a great story how an 18-month-old boy literally saved the life of a well-known opera singer.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
GUPTA: The New York Metropolitan Opera, it's one of the world's great stages and when Eric Jordan sings bass, there his booming voice fits right in. But two years ago, when he was barely 40, it almost ended.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
(SINGING)
ERIC JORDAN, OPERA SINGER: Every time I sing, my soul is bared.
GUPTA (voice-over): When he had a stroke a year and a half ago, opera singer Eric Jordan's ability to bare his soul to sing was stifled.
Five-thirty a.m., the morning of the stroke, 18-month-old Gabriel crawls into bed with his parents and everyone goes back to sleep, except Eric.
CHRISTINA ARETHAS, WIFE OF ERIC JORDAN: I though he was just trying to settle down again and get comfortable. He never stop moving around and jerking around. Then I realized there's something wrong.
GUPTA: Then the moving around stopped abruptly.
ARETHAS: I slapped him. He wouldn't wake up.
GUPTA: Later, at the hospital, a doctor removed three large blood clots in Eric's brain, saving Eric's life, and his ability to sing.
Only eight weeks after his stroke, the bass was back on stage at New York's Metropolitan Opera.
JORDAN: This is a very magical house.
GUPTA: Eric says that recovering from a stroke has forced him to slow down, and to savor life's small blessings, and to accept this new version of himself.
JORDAN: How you change the way that you look at something helps you change yourself.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
GUPTA: That's going to wrap things up for SGMD. But stay connected with me at CNN.com/Sanjay.
Let's keep the conversation going on Twitter @DrSanjayGupta.
Time now, though, to get you back on the CNN NEWSROOM.
