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At This Hour

Top 10 Health Stories of 2014; New Treatments in Cancer Fight; Year's Most Talked About Stories in 2014

Aired December 26, 2014 - 11:30   ET

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

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

DR. ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN SENIOR MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Congressional hearings were held. And V.A. Secretary Eric Shinseki vowed to resign. President Obama brought in a new secretary, Bob McDonald, who has vowed to clean up the V.A.

7.1 million more people had health insurance this year under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. As you probably know, Obamacare mandates that Americans be covered by an insurance plan or pay a penalty.

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Last year, I had an epiphany about weed. This plant can have real medicinal benefits.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Marijuana is best of all those terms for you?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yeah.

GUPTA: We saw families pack up and move across the country to get access to the only medicine that seemed to work for their children in states where medical marijuana is legal. Two states, Colorado, and Washington, also legalized all forms of marijuana, including recreational use.

COHEN: On September 24, a New Jersey four-year-old died in his sleep. It was the first death health officials could directly link to Enterovirus D-68 which can cause severe respiratory symptoms. By the time the scare settled down, EVD-68 had sickened 150 children in all 50 states.

GUPTA: Without a doubt, the biggest health line of the year, Ebola.

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN HOST, A.C. 360: Ebola.

COHEN: Ebola.

WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: Ebola.

GUPTA (on camera): Ebola. He had been exposed to Ebola in Liberia.

(voice-over): What began as a single case in Guinea last December has grown into an epidemic of unprecedented proportions. In the first of its kind, two aid workers, two aid workers, Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol, were Medavaced back to the United States from Liberia. They survived, followed by others, thanks, in part, to the selfless work of nurses, doctors and other health care workers who literally put their own lives on the line.

As 2014 comes to a close, the World Health Organization says more than 6,000 deaths among roughly 18,000 sick. The outbreak in West Africa is far from over, but early-stage vaccine trials are under way and they look promising.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

ASHLEIGH BANFIELD, CNN ANCHOR: Dr. Sanjay Gupta, one of our favorites.

And another favorite right there on your screen. Catch the Top 10 of 2014 with Brooke Baldwin on CNN on Sunday evening at 6:30 p.m. eastern time.

2014 saw a number of advances in the treatment of cancer, which is a disease that touches us all. You ready for this statistic? One in every four deaths in the United States is from cancer. But there is some good news. More Americans are now surviving with cancer and they're surviving for longer.

Joining us now is Dr. Skip Burris, who is the chief medical officer at the Sarah Cannon Research Institute.

Dr. Burris, thank you for taking the time to talk with us today.

What is perhaps the best news about how far we have come in battling cancer?

DR. SKIP BURRIS, CHIEF MEDICAL OFFICER, SARAH CANNON RESEARCH INSTITUTE: Thank you, Ashleigh. There's a lot of great stories in the treatment of cancer. One of the most impressive statistics is that there will be almost 15 million cancer survivors in the country next year, patients that are fighting and/or are alive after being treated for their cancer. And we're seeing in almost every major cancer the number of patient dying declining each year.

BANFIELD: But, Dr. Burris, we never get the huge headline, and believe me it would be the lead story on every one of their programs that we found a cure. Why are the stats getting better when we don't have that magical panacea?

BURRIS: That's a great question. We're looking for the cure in many disease settings but, in fact, we're finding ways to treat and control cancer in many, many patients. We're looking at trying to transform it into more of a chronic disease. This is not only looking at new drugs but also looking at new ways to use therapies to allow the patient's own immune system to treat their cancer.

BANFIELD: That's what I wanted to ask you about. With the notion that it's terrifying for anyone who hears he or she has cancer and they have to go through this painful and damaging regimen of chemotherapy, radiation, etc., that there are other alternatives. Are the alternatives equal or better or supplemental? Is that adding to improved numbers?

BURRIS: So far, Ashleigh, it looks like in the field of immunotherapy that the advances will be unlimited. We are in an area now where we we've seen several of these approved by FDA for treating certain types of cancer. In particular, two approved for the treatment of melanoma. We're seeing patients now live years and years after being diagnosed with metastatic incurable types of cancer. So I think the promise is bright that we might be talking about patients being long-term survivors if not cures.

BANFIELD: A good friend of mine has been fighting cancer for years and he's sort of that remarkable being who -- I believe his brain is doing it him because he's so intent on killing this disease. He talks about feeding the cancer cells and how testosterone feeds the cells. Are we much better now at determining how to treat those cells, rather than killing them or damaging them with radiation or chemotherapy, we can cure the cancer cells?

BURRIS: That's a great way to think about it, and discussing testosterone is one of those hormones. We know estrogens are a player in many women with breast cancer, and we now know there's other growth factors out there that can cause cancers to grow out of control. There's a number of ways to approach this. We've used hormone- blocking therapies and there's new types of those coming along, often given as a pill, that can allow the cancer cell to not grow and divide and behave more like a normal cell. We also seen in advances in looking at other growth factors in cancer cells and designing pills and types of treatments that can go in, turn off that pathway and allow cells to mature or allow the cells to undergo natural death so the cancer doesn't progress.

BANFIELD: I look at these statistics because I think everybody at some point believes we're just not going to get that disease then you see about 40. 4 percent of member and women in the United States will be diagnosed with some kind of cancer. It just is astounding. And what that makes me think is please tell me there's something big on the horizon because if this announcement is coming for so many of us, and it is, what's the good news that we can expect.

BURRIS: So the good news that we can expect is that we're finding cancers earlier, we actually have better ways to treat them, and we're seeing many more patients live longer without the side effects of therapy. Some of those great advances have come in understanding the molecular profile or the machinery that's causing the cancer to grow and divide. Other advances are the immuno-therapies that we talked about, where we're using the patient's own immune some eradicate or eliminate the cancer. We had 19 new drug approvals this year, in 2014, and there's many more very promising therapies in late stages of cancer research which look equally promising.

BANFIELD: I'm going to wish you a very happy 2015 and a very successful 2015 because your folks at the Sarah Cannon Research Institute are doing great work and we need you to do exceptional work.

Dr. Skip Burris, thanks so much for being with us.

BURRIS: Thank you, Ashleigh.

BANFIELD: A quick shout out to my friend, Donnie, beating cancer as we speak. He was featured on "Stand Up to Cancer" if you had a chance to see it. If you didn't, Google it. Fantastic story, fantastic guy. Great, great head on his shoulders.

Still ahead @THISHOUR, what stories had you talking this year? Was it the racial tensions in Ferguson? Was it the rise of the terrorist group ISIS? What about the Ice Bucket Challenge that plagued your inbox. We'll run down the year's most talked about stories next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BANFIELD: CNN has covered thousands of stories just in 2014 alone, but some certainly did strike a nerve with many of our viewers. In some cases, it was easy to understand why. Others, nobody saw coming. For example, who would have guessed that a Boeing 777 would vanish mid-flight? Its whereabouts still a mystery to this day. Who knew the NFL would become a poster child for domestic violence or that the football commissioner would seem so unprepared for the sudden notoriety that he'd gotten. Perhaps, the wider acceptance of marijuana across the United States was easier to foresee. But the mass kidnappings and the killings by the terrorist group Boko Haram in Nigeria? That seemed to take everybody by surprise as well.

We'll take a closer look at those, but let's begin our discussion of this year's most talkable stories with these: Ferguson, Missouri, the rise of ISIS, the Ebola epidemic, data hacking, and the ALS Ice Bucket challenge.

With me to talk about why each one of these stories hit home with viewers, CNN commentators, L.Z. Granderson; Mel Robbins; and media icon, Mr. Joe Concha.

Welcome to all of you. Happy Christmas, happy 2014, happy 2015 on the horizon.

Let me start with you, Joe.

Why is it, in particular, that certain stories that we don't expect just go crazy? They go viral and they are plaguing the cable networks.

JOE CONCHA, MEDIAITE COLUMNIST: You just answered your own question. They go viral. You mentioned ISIS before. Why did ISIS become a huge player when 99 percent of Americans didn't know about that in January? Social media. Remember, Jim Foley gets beheaded in August. Within minutes, millions see this on YouTube because it goes viral on Twitter and it becomes basically a WMD, but not a weapon of mass destruction but a weapon of mass distribution. And that's why ISIS came from nowhere to the player they are now, even trumping al Qaeda.

BANFIELD: Are you saying the Internet is driving news now or is it just that we are now more exposed to the stories that would have had us driven to our cable channel anyway? CONCHA: I think Twitter gets your attention, says hey, see what's

going on with CNN, FOX and NBC, what's going on in Ferguson, Missouri, for instance. That became a prime-time event because the grand jury decision was made at night. So at 9:00, people settle into their homes and they see protests and burning buildings and they may not have known about it before but on their Facebook, their Twitter account, they get the heads up this is happening. And that's what's driving the news right now.

BANFIELD: Maybe all starting with the Arab Spring.

Mel, I want to bring into this. You don't have to limit it to one but is will one you could not get out of your mind. We have to think through our files. But was there one that stood out for-to-you for sure as the leader?

MEL ROBBINS, CNN COMMENTATOR: Absolutely. The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. You know, last year, they raised $5 million in the same amount of time that they raised $115 million for a disease that most people hadn't even thought about. Maybe -- like, unfortunately, my mother's best friend died of Lou Gehrig's disease this year so we were well aware of the deadly disease. But to watch that social media phenomenon just take over, to see former presidents and folks like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Gates, all the way down to kids and families and teens take that on, it was incredibly moving. I think it did a tremendous amount of good. And it was certainly the story that really stuck with me this year, Ashleigh.

BANFIELD: L.Z. Granderson, I'm going to guess you're going to pick a political topic, because you tend to do so much commentary on the politics of it all.

L.Z. GRANDERSON, CNN COMMENTATOR: That would be true. I am leaning toward looking at the Democrats in 2014 showing how spineless they are. As we are heading towards the New Year or we're beginning to look at these metrics in terms of the economy, how much better U.S. is doing, whether you want to talk about gas prices, the unemployment numbers, the GDP, if you want to talk about a number of people's health care? And what you saw heading towards the midterm elections were candidates, Democrats, running from the president because of bad press, because his numbers were down. You didn't see them fight. And because of that, you saw a lot of races that Democrats could have won if that base had shown up lose because they were so depressed and their leader. Democrats saw through it and, more importantly, Republicans weren't fooled. Just because you distanced yourself from the president didn't mean you were a viable candidate for Republicans. You were still seen as a Democrat. That strategy completely failed. And to me, on the political scene, domestically, that was the biggest story of 2014.

BANFIELD: So a huge story globally became a very, very big story in America even though we weren't suffering nearly the way the rest of the world was. I'm talking about Ebola.

Joe, weigh in as to why it was such a huge story for Americans when just one person had been afflicted, before that one person had even died.

CONCHA: Fear of the unknown, Ashleigh. People always heard about Ebola happening in Africa the way it was spreading, then suddenly we have the case here, a man dies, nurses are affected. If you watch the coverage in October, you'd figure we'd be dead by now because the fear and speculation just went crazy. Meanwhile, some people just forget to get or refuse to get their flu shots. Tens of thousands will die of this flu this year but that one Ebola case resonated because of social media, 24/7 news coverage and a hell of a lot of speculation -- Ashleigh?

BANFIELD: And the "Time" magazine choice, they chose the Ebola fighters. Was that a surprise?

CONCHA: That was a great pink. Thank God they chose them. My wife is a doctor, so I may be biased.

Who I would have gone with, Malala Yousafzai. She was the youngest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. And the Taliban targeted her. An assassin got on a school bus, said which one is Malala? Shot her in the head. She survives. She wins the Nobel Peace Prize. She says she wants to be the prime minister of Pakistan one day. I wouldn't bet against that. She is advocating girls' education. But we saw what happened last week with the Taliban going into a school and shooting up school children because of what Malala's doing. It's an important story and I would have given it to her, given her challenge.

BANFIELD: As we still have a whole bunch more stories can talk about, can you three stay over the break. Have you got anywhere you have to be?

ROBBINS: Absolutely.

BANFIELD: Sales, anything like that? Good. I'll put you to work after the break because I know all three of you remember that story that wouldn't go away, the disappearance of that Malaysia Airliner. By the way, it's still disappeared. Why did it grip the nation the way that it did? We'll get to the bottom of that next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BANFIELD: Welcome back. We are ticking through the news stories that resonated with most of you this year. Among them, the mysterious disappearance of flight 370. Also, the NFL's public relations nightmare over domestic abuse. The dramatic upswing of approval of marijuana in the West. And the frightening rise of the terror group Boko Haram in Nigeria.

I want to bring back my panel, L.Z. Granderson, Mel Robbins, Joe Concha.

Let's talk about the MH story, which was a story that would not go away. Some people criticized CNN because our coverage was wall-to- wall. We don't dictate what we want you to know. We go after what you're asking us to tell you.

But while people want to see it, Joe, they are angry that they are seeing it.

CONCHA: May have gone a little too heavy on the coverage.

BANFIELD: Is that what you think?

CONCHA: But this is the greatest mystery of the 21st century. This is a jumbo jet that disappears. I find my phone, if I leave it on a subway because I can track it but I can't track a plane, where it ends up going? Certainly, the coverage was justified, and the fact that we still don't know a thing about this, again, is a mystery that I'm afraid will never be solved.

BANFIELD: And in the age of terror, we had dozens of people dead and something we didn't assume, in this day in age, in technology, that this could happen. So there was a confluent of a lot of different stories that came into one that we thought was going to have an answer.

CONCHA: What's your theory? What do you think happened?

BANFIELD: I'm not going there. I'm done with it. Every time I had a theory, the problem was, there was something that knocked it down.

I want to talk NFL, folks.

Mel, let me start with you.

You spent many an hour with me on this set talking about the NFL, talking about the public relations and the behavior. This is the year of the NFL having to defend itself against a lot of things.

ROBBINS: Yeah, Ashleigh. It was certainly a huge story. For me, I guess the major takeaway is that it was a story about failed leadership on the part of Goodell because he wasn't clear about where the NFL stood. I think we still are not that clear about what is going to happen if a player gets arrested this weekend, even though they've kind of outlined these plans.

Just to also say something else about this, the reason why it was so big, even though it was a sports story, and there's lots of people around the world that love sports, there's plenty that don't pay attention at all, it's something that Joe said earlier. Social media. There has been a complete inversion in terms of what drives the news and it's what people are reading on their phones and, more importantly, in their Facebook feeds. And when that ray rice video got released by TMZ, it flooded Facebook feeds around the globe and drove awareness around a story that might otherwise have been buried, Ashleigh. But to me, the big take away is that Goodell, it was not clear in his leadership and he remains not clear about where the NFL stands regarding domestic violence.

BANFIELD: All right, L.Z., I want you to jump in on something here. Sanjay Gupta won an award for his reporting on the use of medical marijuana. Look, Sanjay is responsible for a lot of very powerful leaders in our country saying that they changed their minds about the use of not only medical marijuana but even maybe recreational. That may be where they are headed. I want you to weigh in on where we started 2014 and where we end it in a couple of days when it comes to marijuana in general in this country.

GRANDERSON: Well, I like how you say the marijuana story to the brother with the dreadlocks. I want you to point that out first.

(LAUGHTER)

BANFIELD: Oh, I knew you were going to say something like that.

(LAUGHTER)

GRANDERSON: Well, it's important to know that this story didn't begin in 2014 or 2013, but goes back to the reason why marijuana was classified in a drug category that it was. It wasn't based on science but a knee-jerk reaction to the Nixon administration not liking hippies and not liking our veterans coming back from Vietnam addicted to drugs. Marijuana was quickly put together with some much more damaging and horrific drugs, like cocaine. Now science has asserted itself and pushing back what is the normal public response to marijuana, thinking it's a horrible boogie man and realizing that once you start doing the science and not just a knee-jerk reaction, there are benefits to this drug, like so many other drugs that we have. I'm glad to see that 2014 is the year that we decided to listen to science and not just have a knee-jerk reaction to something.

BANFIELD: I want to get all three of you to weigh in on Ferguson. Because I think no matter where you stand, there was some remarkable coverage not only on this but other networks, newspapers, about what happened in Ferguson and then what happened across the country.

Joe, start off with giving me your take on why Ferguson took off the way it did, why mike Brown became the way he did in the media and where you think that is taking us as a nation.

CONCHA: Ashleigh, this is a story that has legs well beyond August and November, which is particularly after the grand jury decision. We see with these two police officers executed in broad daylight, it is being traced back to what happened with Michael Brown and Eric Garner and the racial moment that began in Ferguson, it began well before that but everybody saw on their tv sets on a Monday night and all of the anger and all of the coverage, this is something that will resonate for a long time and will be a big story in 2014.

BANFIELD: So, Mel, are we a better nation or a worse nation, now that this has all been laid bare and the voices are getting louder?

ROBBINS: You know, Ashleigh, it's a great question. I think we're going to be a better nation. One of the things that struck me about this story is just how ingrained in your camp people were in this story. You're either pro-police and can't see the other side of the protesters or you're a protester and you somehow are against the police. And the truth of the matter is, the majority of Americans are somewhere in the middle. We want justice for all.

BANFIELD: OK. So, L.Z., it seems, for a lot of people, the chasm is bigger. Is this just the pain before the healing?

GRANDERSON: I think it's the recognition that there's always been damage. A part of the reason why this is coming to a head is that we always strike this conversation about what can the police do to rebuild the relationships in the community. The fact is, there was never really a bridge we just never reported on the big gap between the way that minorities thought police were being treated them and the way that the larger community saw the story.

If I could just refute something that Joe said earlier, that individual that killed those two police officers, from all we can tell from the reporting, he was mentally ill. It's important that we don't group together what protesters are fighting for, the looters and rioters who aren't fighting for anything, and this one individual who happens to be mentally ill.

(CROSSTALK)

GRANDERSON: That's really important that we keep that separate in our narrative as we go forward in covering what is happening with the police and the minority community.

BANFIELD: Thanks, L.Z. Got to cut it there.

Mel Robbins, L.Z., Joe Concha, thank you for joining me. And happy New Year.

(CROSSTALK)

BANFIELD: Thank you, everyone, for joining us @THISHOUR. A lot more coming up on "Legal View" right after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)