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Sanjay Gupta MD
Ebola in America; Matt Damon's "White Knuckle Crisis"; Mike Rowe's "Gotta Do It"
Aired October 11, 2014 - 16:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN HOST: We've got a great show in line for you today.
Matt Damon -- he's going to be stopping by. He's taking on one of the most pressing needs I think in the world today. The question is, why does he think he's the guy to do it?
Plus, Mike Rowe, our newest colleague here at CNN, he's going to explain to me why he's the guy who's got to do it.
But, first, it's a crisis that seems to have no end. We've been talking about this for some time. The number of Ebola cases in West Africa continues to climb as we begin to hear of cases outside of the hot zone here in the United States and Spain.
My colleague and friend senior medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen is in Dallas where that first case was diagnosed on U.S. soil. I'll tell you, it's left a lot of questions about whether or not this country is ready.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN SENIOR MEDICAL CORRESPONDET (voice-over): This weekend, the United States starts tighter screening of airline passengers coming in from Ebola hot spots in West Africa, taking passengers' temperatures, administering questionnaires and conducting visual assessments regarding travelers' health.
New York's JFK will be the first, and then, Newark, Chicago's O'Hare Airport, Washington Dulles and Atlanta.
DR. THOMAS FRIEDEN, CDC DIRECTOR: These five airports represent 94, nearly 95 percent of all of the 150 travelers per day who arrive from these three countries.
COHEN: That announcement came just hours after the passing of Thomas Eric Duncan, the 42-year-old Liberian man who had come to visit his son and girlfriend here in the U.S. and ended up the first Ebola case diagnosed in America. He initially came to the hospital on September 25th but was sent back home with antibiotics. Three days later, his girlfriend's daughter found him in his room.
LOUISE, MOTHER OF EBOLA PATIENT'S SON: She brought him some tea. She brought him teas. She fixed him tea to drink. That's how she saw him and called the ambulance.
COHEN: He was taken to Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas. Duncan would be there for nearly a week before he was given the experimental drug Brincidofovir, but it wasn't enough to save him.
Brincidofovir is just one of a number of experimental treatments being used to dry to fight Ebola. Avigan, a drug initially designed to help the flu has been treating Ebola patients in France and has been shipped to other countries as well. TKM Ebola was used on Dr. Rick Sacra, but his doctors insist that the drug's effectiveness isn't known. And ZMapp, the drug given to Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol, but the manufacturers say there is no more supply.
The hospital has come under fire for the handling of Duncan's case, from letting them leave when he told them he'd recently been in Liberia, to questions as to why it took so long to get Duncan access to experimental treatments. Texas health officials said, "This past week has been an enormous test of our health system, and if Duncan's case was a test, the results were mixed at best."
Elizabeth Cohen, CNN, Dallas.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
GUPTA: I tell you I hear from many of you, and I understand the situation is frightening. It is confusing at times. We'll try to do the best we can in terms of explaining it. But when we need answers ourselves, we often look to the man who runs the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He has put himself front and center as the face of the U.S. response to Ebola. And what he has to say is a little different sometimes from what we've come to expect.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
GUPTA (voice-over): Walking briskly like a man on a mission, facing what may be the biggest and most public challenge of his life, Dr. Thomas Frieden.
FRIEDEN: We're stepping up protection for people coming into this country.
GUPTA: The message: we've got this.
FRIEDEN: We know now how to stop Ebola.
This is a tried-and-true, reliable health strategy.
GUPTA: Ebola is terrifying Americans and Frieden's seen it up close in Liberia and is confident he'll get us through the storm.
FRIEDEN: Ebola is scary. It's a deadly disease, but we know how to stop it.
GUPTA: He learned his craft fighting tuberculosis, first as a junior CDC disease detective in New York City. Then, in India. FRIEDEN: One of the things that is encouraging even though it's a
terrible disease is that we know how to stop it. You treat tuberculosis, it goes away. And that's not too dissimilar to what we're dealing with, with Ebola. The treatment isn't as effective but the control measures are.
GUPTA: In science as in life, it's tricky.
(on camera): My understanding reading your guidelines, sir, is that within three feet or direct contact if I were to shake your hand, for example, we'd both qualify as being contact.
FRIEDEN: We look at each situation individually and we assess it based --
GUPTA: Why --
FRIEDEN: -- on how sick the individual is and what the nature of the contact is. And certainly, if you're within three feet, that's a situation we want to be concerned about, but in this case, where we haven't hugged, we haven't shaken hands, we have not had any contact that would allow either of our body fluids to be in contact with the other person.
GUPTA: It's not something he could have learned at Oberlin College or Columbia Medical School. But the man friends describe as shy is different at the podium.
FRIEDEN: What's really important not just to Africa but to the U.S. and the world that we stop the outbreak and to do that, we need regular travel.
GUPTA: Maybe something he learned from his old boss, Mayor Michael Bloomberg. With Frieden as health commissioner, New York City saw one first after another -- banning public indoor smoking, requiring restaurants to post calorie counts.
DR. ALFRED MORABIA, PROFESSOR OF EPIDEMIOLOGY, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY: The speed at which the transition from evidence, scientific evidence, to impact on the community took place and thanks to his work as health commissioner was impressive.
GUPTA: Some called it a nanny state. Frieden calmly shrugs it off.
FRIEDEN: Bottom line is results. We saved lives.
GUPTA: And when he came under fire for the mishandling of dangerous lab samples at the CDC just months before the Ebola outbreak, we saw those skills put to use.
FRIEDEN: I'm disappointed by what happened and frankly I'm angry about it.
GUPTA: The thing about being overly confident, it's risky.
FRIEDEN: There is no doubt in my mind that we can stop it in its tracks here.
GUPTA: But Frieden's message seems to be what a frightened country needs right now.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
GUPTA: Up next, a big star with an even bigger cause. We hear a lot about celebrities and their causes. Matt Damon may be a little bit different. You decide, after this.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
GUPTA: I think about all the time. Clean water. Access to a toilet. Think about that. Those are two things that most of us just take for granted.
But when I visited Pakistan and India recently, I saw first hand the health impacts of not having these basic things and it can be very devastating. It is an important problem to solve. A lot of people have tried this but it's also one that actor Matt Damon is now pouring his time and money into fixing.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
GUPTA (voice-over): This Indian village is celebrating something many of us take for granted, access to clean running water. The people here are finally getting a water pump. And UNICEF says on-premise access to clean water is something only one in four people has in India.
That's actor Matt Damon and his Water.org co-founder Gary White. They've worked all over the world.
MATT DAMON, CO-FOUNDER, WATER.ORG: There was a little girl, she was 13. We had just put in a water system in there, in this rural village, and I took her aside to talk to her. And she had gone on water collections for -- it was about two to three hours a day.
I said, "Well, what are you going to do with all this extra time, you'll have more time for school work?" And she said, "I don't need more time for school work. I'm the smartest kid in my class." She said it in that way where I knew she was telling the truth, you know, and she looked me right in the eye and she goes, "I'm going to play."
GUPTA: Access to clean water and sanitation for everyone is Water.org's mission.
DAMON: It's killing a child every 20 seconds, which is unfathomable that these children are dying from things like diarrhea.
GUPTA: UNICEF says 36 percent of the world's population does not have access to toilets and 768 million people still use unsafe drinking water.
Among the devastating health impacts, stunting, malnutrition, diarrhea, which kills 600,000 children a year, according to UNICEF. (on camera): You have four daughters. I have three daughters and you
have one daughter. What was about this (AUDIO GAP)
DAMON: It was just so massive and it underpinned everything.
If you take away water from a community, then that means none of the girls are in school because they are all scavenging for water. So, our daughters would be off looking for a water source and hauling water for the family, and they would have no prospects for a life or a future.
GUPTA (voice-over): Damon and White say this can be fixed through micro-financing. With loans often less than $100.
GARY WHITE, CO-FOUNDER, WATER.ORG: And now we've had over 1.6 million people get access to water and sanitation, not through charity, but through a microloan and they're being repaid at 99 percent.
DAMON: Now, they have a pipe coming into their house, like we all do and now they no longer have to go wait in these lines and spend all this time. And so, they pay these loans back because they had this extra time.
GUPTA: They say they still have a long way to go, which is why Damon continues to fight for more awareness. For his ice bucket challenge, he used toilet water.
DAMON: Collecting it from the various toilets around the house.
GUPTA: While humor may help get the message out. for Damon and White, the situation is serious.
DAMON: It's an absolute just white knuckle crisis right now for, you know, three quarters of a billion people.
GUPTA: A crisis they're trying to fix -- a few dollars and one toilet at a time.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
GUPTA: We wanted to talk about that because these guys are just doing incredible work and, you know, after all, somebody's got to do it.
That takes us to our newest member of our CNN family, Mike Rowe. He's going to join me to talk about his new series and also what makes a really good TV. He should know.
But, first, this week's "Human Factor".
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
KATIE SHARIFY, STEM CELL DONOR: The only thing that I did different that morning was unbuckle my seat belt.
GUPTA (voice-over): It was a split second decision that forever changed the life of 26-year-old Katie Sharify. SHARIFY: I was driving down on Interstate 5, a drive that I'd done
hundreds of times.
GUPTA: But this drive turned terribly wrong.
Sharify says the last memory she had of that day was unbuckling her seat belt and reaching down to grab a can of soda that was rolling around the floorboard.
SHARIFY: I didn't think anything of it. I'd done it before. You know, you kind of reach over, grab your purse, grab whatever on the passenger's side.
GUPTA: But Sharify's car veered off the highway ejecting her from the back windshield.
SHARIFY: And that was it. I snapped my back in half, compressed my spinal cord.
GUPTA: Instantly paralyzed from her mid-chest down.
Just days after the accident, Sharify was asked to participate in the world's first human embryonic stem cell trial for spinal cord injuries. Doctors need volunteers like Sharify to act as human guinea pigs in order to test the safety of experimental treatments.
But it would not help with her recovery now she was told. In fact, doctors warned her it could possibly make things worse. But still Sharify said yes.
SHARIFY: I would like for future injuries to have an option, have a treatment available, have hope, because I know it's very hopeless in the beginning and you just think your life is over.
GUPTA: Two years since the accident, Sharify's life is far from over. She's back to school, has become a young advocate for stem cell research, and this summer she even learned how to surf.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
GUPTA: I'll tell you, you know, we were all pretty excited to welcome our newest colleague Mike Rowe to the CNN family just this week. I think his new show is smart, it's funny and it's always unexpected.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MIKE ROWE, CNN HOST, "SOMEBODY'S GOTTA DO IT": That's right.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Here's Chris.
ROWE: (INAUDIBLE)
Chris has just told me that my wet suit's on backwards and I might care when I go down to depth. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You know, everything squeezes.
ROWE: Oh.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You may want to go change that.
ROWE: Zip me?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: How does that fit now?
ROWE: It feels like a dream. It feels like a --
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Nicely done.
ROWE: Yes, thanks. How are you?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Very good. How are you doing?
ROWE: I feel great.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You'll feel even better in the deep pool.
ROWE: I bet.
But getting in the water here, that's complicated.
Just building the suspense, right?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Absolutely.
ROWE: Awesome.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
GUPTA: Thank you for being here.
ROWE: Yes, thanks for having me.
GUPTA: How's it going so far?
ROWE: Honestly, great. It's a really nice bunch of people around here and I don't mean to sound, you know, filled with shock and awe when I say that but I've been in TV for a long time.
GUPTA: They are nice what?
ROWE: These are nice people. And they've been super friendly and really welcoming and I'm grateful.
GUPTA: TV is its own culture but even within TV, you have different places that you've worked. How is CNN different?
ROWE: Well, at a glance, I think most people look at CNN and see a news network and obviously you are, but fundamentally you are a nonfiction network, right? I mean, there are only two kinds of TV, there's fiction and non-fiction, and the way everything breaks down after that is kind of fascinating today because a lot of words no longer mean what I thought they meant like, you know, unscripted doesn't mean without a script anymore. And nonfiction doesn't necessarily mean the absence of fiction and reality, I don't -- I don't even get me started I have no idea what reality means.
GUPTA: What was the ultimate goal do you think? People get entertained by these shows, they learn something.
ROWE: Yes.
GUPTA: Is there an overarching goal for you? What would make you the proudest if somebody watched your show and said this adjective at the end of it?
ROWE: Well, authentic is the word. And I -- you know, I've seen what you do, and I love it because you're industry and so much of historic news comes from a place of authority. Because you have to be correct. The stakes are high, you know, you want the facts right, you want the diagnosis to be right.
But what's for sale today in a weird way is not authority. It's authenticity. And so, you know, to be believable today on TV, in my view anyway, you need to first and foremost be consistent with who you are --
GUPTA: Yes.
ROWE: -- when the viewer sees that they begin to trust you. So, you know, the kind of shows that I do and the kind of work that I've done over the years I try and focus on a couple of basic things. No second takes.
GUPTA: Hmm.
ROWE: No scripts.
GUPTA: Interesting.
ROWE: It's -- it's better to be authentic --
GUPTA: Do that again?
ROWE: Ah. It was going so well! But it's exactly -- look, if you let the viewer see you try and fail and not always be at your best, I just think ultimately it builds trust.
GUPTA: Yes.
ROWE: That's what I've tried to do.
GUPTA: It's interesting because I think people, I don't know what people's assumptions are when they watch television, if they're watching something contrived or not. I mean, I remember when I started here, and this is not my first profession, but I didn't know how to behave, and so I would think about people that I watch on television, you know, Stone Phillips and my voice would drop down a couple of --
ROWE: And now the news!
GUPTA: That's right.
ROWE: Of course.
GUPTA: But it was hard and it didn't feel real and then I remember one day my wife said to me imagine that that lens is one of your patients.
ROWE: There you go.
GUPTA: That I got. I want them --
ROWE: Sure, because you know that relationship.
GUPTA: Yes, I want them to understand. I want to use language that will not go over their heads all that sort of stuff and that worked for me, but I stammer still when I talk and I pause for long periods of time.
ROWE: Like a human.
GUPTA: Right, right. But people are comfortable with that as viewers, I think, aren't they?
ROWE: I think they're relieved when they see it because, look, in the end all things valuable are the result of a connection and a human connection is what our species craves most.
GUPTA: Right.
ROWE: If we can find a human connection, you know, through this mystical, magical thing, that's super cool. It doesn't happen much for the reason you said. In order to have the certainty we crave, we imitate what we see. Thereby creating an end's had feedback loop of derivativeness, OK?
GUPTA: Yes.
ROWE: So that's why -- that's why most local news looks like most local news. And why most FM radio sounds the same and why, you know, we get ourselves into these little boxes.
GUPTA: You are absolutely right. I think you're right.
ROWE: And so the minute, you know, a guy shows up, I mean, people think I'm trying to be precious wearing a cap. I'm not. I honestly wear it because when I take it off, my hair looks bad and when my hair looks bad somebody comes out and fixes it and if they are fixing that you can use some powder and next thing you know, you are covered with makeup and powder and your hair looks like somebody else's hair.
GUPTA: Right.
ROWE: Pretty soon, you know, I would rather not do that if I can help it.
GUPTA: It's a real pleasure to have you here. I've been a fan for a long time.
ROWE: It's really great to chat with you.
GUPTA: I can't wait to watch the program.
ROWE: Quick story. I was shooting in Atlanta shooting things for my promos. They have a cardboard cut-out of you down there?
GUPTA: I've seen it in the store.
ROWE: They've got a cardboard cut-out of Sanjay. It's awesome. You should get one. And they put yours next to mine and through a weird misstep I took you down, I grabbed your cut-out and you collapsed in my arms.
GUPTA: Sorry, the cardboard, it didn't. I hope you weren't hurt or anything.
ROWE: It was heartbreaking. I had a nasty paper cut and my lawyers are going to be in touch.
GUPTA: I would expect no less.
By the way, this isn't even my suit, speaking of authenticity.
ROWE: This isn't my sweater. I'm totally naked under this.
GUPTA: Thanks a lot. Appreciate it.
ROWE: You're welcome.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
GUPTA: New episodes of "Somebody's Gotta Do It", they premiere every Wednesday nights, 9:00 Eastern, only here on CNN.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
GUPTA: It would be hard to describe just what an incredible project this whole thing was to work on. I took my whole family, my wife, my three daughters, my mom and dad. We went on a trip halfway around the world to discover our roots.
And, you know, I had conversations with my parents the likes of which I'd never really had before and next weekend right here on SGMD, you're going to see the entire journey unfold.
But in the meantime, we got a treat. You can logon to CNN.com/roots, for some photos up there, even a few outtakes, pretty funny. You can find out how my dad, a lifetime vegetarian, got tricked into eating meat for the first time when he arrived in the United States from India. Also, you're going to hear my mom sing. My mom is singing an incredible song, a song that our family sang as they became refugees and they were forced out of their hometown in rural Pakistan.
I hope you'll join us for that story. It's next Saturday, 4:30 p.m. Eastern and Sunday at 7:30 in the morning, right here on CNN.
Time now, though, to get you back into the "CNN NEWSROOM" with Ana Cabrera.
