Return to Transcripts main page

New Day

Possible New Ebola Case In Kansas City; Ebola-Stricken Dallas Nurse Identified; CDC: U.S. Must "Rethink" Approach To Ebola; Kim Jong-Un Resurfaces in New Photos; ISIS Closing in on Baghdad

Aired October 14, 2014 - 06:00   ET

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

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Not one more health care worker, or one more nurse should be infected.

CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: Breaking new details, the Dallas nurse battling Ebola now receiving the blood of a recent survivor. How it could save her. This as the CDC and hospitals across the country scramble to update their procedures. But do they know what to change?

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: And breaking overnight, he's back. Kim Jong-Un reportedly making his first appearance in months. These new pictures show him walking with a cane. Does this end the speculation, or just add a new twist?

MICHAELA PEREIRA, CNN ANCHOR: Seismic tip. The Vatican making a huge change in tone in how it deals with gays and divorced Catholics. How big of a step is this for the church? We're live from the Vatican.

CUOMO: Your NEW DAY starts right now.

ANNOUNCER: This is NEW DAY with Chris Cuomo, Kate Bolduan, and Michaela Pereira.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

CUOMO: Good morning. Welcome to NEW DAY. It is Tuesday, October 14th, 6:00 in the east. Alisyn Camerota joins me. Thanks for being here again.

CAMEROTA: My pleasure. Great to see you.

CUOMO: Appreciate it. We are going to begin with that 26-year-old nurse who contracted Ebola trying to save an infected Liberian patient. She's now been identified. She's on your screen. She is Nina Pham. She's in stable condition.

And in the latest development, she's been transfused with the plasma of Kent Brantley. He is the Texas physician who survived the deadly virus.

CAMEROTA: It is still not clear how Pham became infected, but the CDC is urging hospitals every tore to rethink Ebola. This as another patient with symptoms is being monitored at a Kansas hospital. He's a medic who worked on a boat off Africa's west coast.

Doctors believe he only has a low to moderate risk of actual infection. CNN's complete coverage of all the developments begins this morning in Dallas with senior medical correspondent, Elizabeth Cohen. Good morning, Elizabeth. What's the latest?

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN SENIOR MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Alisyn. Doctors and nurses who care for Ebola patients, they are true heroes, risking their own lives to help other people. This hospital here in Dallas got an experimental treatment for one of their own very quickly.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

COHEN (voice-over): This morning, doctors in Dallas anxious to see if a blood transfusion may save the life of a critical care nurse, Nina Pham, the first person to contract Ebola within the U.S. She took care of Thomas Eric Duncan who passed away last week.

Pham received the donation from Ebola survivor, Dr. Kent Brantly, the hope that his blood may provide key antibodies to fight the disease.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Everybody should ask to help us to give over this and I know in the long run she will help a lot of people.

COHEN: The 26-year-old is one of around 70 hospital staffers who cared for Duncan, according to the "Associated Press." The AP reports they reached that number after being given Duncan's medical records by his family. The CDC says they're still working to compile a list of health care workers who came into contact with Duncan.

DR. TOM FRIEDEN, CDC DIRECTOR: If this one individual was infected and we don't know how, within the isolation unit, then it is possible that other individuals could have been infected as well.

COHEN: An official with direct knowledge of the investigation tells CNN that CDC detectives who is interviewed the nurse several times believe there are, quote, "inconsistencies in the type of gear the nurse used, how she put it on and took it off." But fellow nurses say Pham was always careful.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Knowing Nina, she's one of the most meticulous, thorough, effective nurses like she taught me infection control and hand hygiene and protocol. I learned so much of that from her.

COHEN: State and federal health officials are still unsure how Pham was infected, but they say it may be time to reexamine Ebola safety protocols.

FRIEDEN: We have to rethink the way we address Ebola infection control.

COHEN: Officials even considering moving patients to special containment hospitals. This as Ebola fear escalates amid international flights into the U.S. Shortly after landing in Boston Monday, a hazmat team boarded an Emirates Airline flight from Dubai and removed five passengers exhibiting flu-like symptoms. After examination, officials determined none of the five met the criteria for Ebola and none of them came from West Africa.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

COHEN (on camera): Now I know that it sounds incongruous if Nina Pham was so careful, how could there have been this breach in protocol? How could anything have gone wrong? Well, safety experts tell me that unfortunately that's relatively common.

Even terrific doctors and nurses, who are very careful -- things go wrong because this is such a hard procedure to do. It's difficult to put this corrective gear on correctly all the time and that's why they say doctors and nurses need to drill, drill, drill, to try to get this right -- Alisyn.

CAMEROTA: Elizabeth, we're going to talk a lot more about that right now with our experts, thanks so much for the report.

So let's bring in Dr. Alexander Van Tulleken, a senior fellow at the Institute for International Humanitarian Affairs, who specializes in tropical diseases, and Dr. Joseph McCormick, a professor and regional dean at the University of Texas School of Public Health.

He worked for the CDC in 1976 when he helped investigate the first Ebola epidemic in Central Africa. So it's great to have both of you here and your expertise this morning. Dr. Van Tulleken, I'll start with you.

It sounds like there are three possible ways for this nurse to have gotten Ebola, either a breakdown in protocol, a breakdown in training or human error. She says she followed all of the protocol and she wore the protective gear, what do you think went wrong?

DR. ALEXANDER VAN TULLEKEN, SENIOR FELLOW, INSTITUTE FOR INTERNATIONAL HUMANITARIAN AFFAIRS: I would actually treat all of those things as basically the same thing. The training should be part of the protocol, and isn't at the moment. The CDC has distributed two different protocols for putting on and taking off protective gear.

CAMEROTA: Is that right? So how do they differ?

TULLEKEN: You can choose whichever one you want. The second thing is that those protocols contain very little information of what to do when you breach protocol, when mistakes are made. Gloves break, gowns fail, things tear, patient spills stuff all over you.

We're talking about very sick patients and so these are easy things to do. So I would treat all of that the same. The nurse is absolutely not to blame. We have to think of this as a package of trained people going in to look after.

CAMEROTA: Dr. McCormick, at this point, how can the CDC still have these inconsistencies?

DR. JOSEPH MCCORMICK, PROFESSOR AND REGIONAL DEAN, UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS, SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH: Well, I agree that this is an issue of training. Look, we, we have pilots in training, flying and flying and flying. And I suspect that's not what happens with most of the hospitals when they're training their teams to address an issue like Ebola.

So I'm certain that this is not so much an issue of protocol, but an issue of training and the detail in which the training occurs. It's also may be an issue of observation. I noticed that in Nebraska, they have someone who actually observes all of the staff, and makes certain that they, that they adhere to the protocols.

CAMEROTA: Another troubling development this morning, Dr. Tulleken, the "Associated Press" got the medical records from the patient who died, Thomas Duncan, and found out that there were 70 staff members at the hospital, workers, who came into contact with him.

TULLEKEN: Yes.

CAMEROTA: What is happening this morning with those 70 people?

TULLEKEN: Well, what you -- I mean, what's very surprising is, that this, that this nurse was not on the list of people who are being observed. So clearly she can self-report. I don't think it's delayed her care in any way.

But we have to worry about these other people now. There's no question there's a period where they may possibly be infected as well. I think it speaks to a broader problem. Again, we're not seeing dedicated Ebola teams who are well trained.

Have they been looking after other patients since? As far as I can understand they absolutely have. That's a real problem, if she's got enough contaminated body fluids on her skin to get sick. She could move around the hospital.

CAMEROTA: Dr. McCormick, should these 70 people who came into contact with Thomas Duncan be quarantined? Should they be under observation? What happens now?

MCCORMICK: Well, remember that people are not infectious until they become ill. They should certainly be under observation. I think it should be active observation. I was very surprised to hear that they were under passive observation. I don't believe they all need to be quarantined.

CAMEROTA: Dr. McCormick, I want to stick with you for you a second because I want to play for you two separate statements from Thomas Frieden, the head of the CDC. These were made two weeks apart and I want to know if you hear any difference in a shift in tone in when he's talking about the Ebola situation. The first one is from September 30th. Listen to this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

FRIEDEN: Isolate them if they have any symptoms and stop the chain of transmission. We're stopping this in its tracks. (END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: On September 30th, he said we're stopping this in its tracks. Now listen to what he said on October 13th.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

FRIEDEN: Stopping Ebola is hard. We're working together to make it safer and easier.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: Safer and easier is different than stopping it in its tracks. Do you think that they are evolving in terms of how difficult they think it is to contain this, Doctor?

MCCORMICK: Well, I think that we are in fact stopping it in its tracks. In the sense that it's certainly not going to become an epidemic as we're seeing in West Africa. That's not to say that it's easy and it's certainly not to say that we're not going to have any secondary infections.

I think it's instructive for example that none of the family members thus far have reported any illness, so I think we have to be cautious. But to expect no secondary cases among family or contacts or even hospital staff probably was a bit unrealistic.

CAMEROTA: Dr. Van Tulleken, do you worry that some doctors could begin to refuse to treat patients, if they don't trust that the protocol works?

TULLEKEN: I think worry about the doctors. I would worry more about the nurses. The nurses are exposed to larger amounts of body fluids. We know that they aren't protected, we have a nurse infected already, but secondly, that they don't believe they are protected either.

And we saw in the SARS epidemic in Canada, the nurses stopped turning up to work and that's a massive problem. So no more people in America need to get Ebola for this to be a massive problem.

We've already got hospitals where you can't get food delivered. We've hospitals where they said they won't collect trash anymore, hospitals where people don't want to go.

The chocolate industry this morning is saying they're worried about their supplies of chocolate. This can affect -- because it comes from West Africa. So rolling back this epidemic in West Africa is really, really important.

And it's not just about controlling it here. There's no danger of an epidemic here, but we should be worried it's going to affect us for sure.

CAMEROTA: Dr. Van Tulleken, Dr. McCormick, thanks so much for all the information this morning. We appreciate having you here. Let's go over to Michaela for a look at other news. PEREIRA: All right, Alisyn, thanks so much.

It's 10 minutes past the hour. Here's a look at your headlines. Climate change poses a huge threat to national security, this according to a new Pentagon report.

This report found extreme weather events increase risks of terrorism, infectious disease, global poverty, and food shortages. The defense department says it's now implementing plans for climate change risks across all of its operations.

Author, activist and professor, Dr. Cornell West among the dozens of people arrested at a rally in Ferguson, Missouri, protesting police violence, the Moral Monday march concluding four days of resistance in Ferguson and St. Louis, demonstrators expressing anger over police killings of black teenagers, Vonderrit Myers and Michael Brown.

Those Ferguson protests spilling their way into Monday night football in St. Louis, demonstrators were at Edward Jones Dome supporting Michael Brown. Some amateur video posted online.

As for action on the field, San Francisco 49ers erasing an early 14-0 deficit to beat the St. Louis Rams 31-17. Colin Kaepernick throwing for 343 yards and three touchdowns to help San Francisco improve its record to 4-2. The Rams fell to 1-4.

I got to tell this story. This is Nigel. This parrot has a story to tell. This African gray parrot took off four years ago from Torrance, California, just outside L.A. What's incredible is that he flew back home to California.

What is truly remarkable is that when Nigel left, he had a British accent. When he returned, he was speaking Espanol, with a slight Panamanian accent and asking for a guy named Larry.

He was reunited with his owner, had to lure him out of the bush a little bit, after the bird tracked down the bird's sales paper. As for Larry, who is this Larry you speak of, Nigel.

Is that not the best story ever? Who is Larry? Like there could be a whole "breaking bad" sequel to a sequel to a sequel.

CAMEROTA: That might be what he was doing.

CUOMO: How do you know he wasn't down the street with the Ramirez family?

PEREIRA: He might have just gone to east L.A. and thought it was a different part of the country. His GPS is a little off. Is that not the best story ever?

CAMEROTA: That parrot has some explaining to do.

PEREIRA: We needed that on a Tuesday.

CUOMO: I'm going to sweat now. CAMEROTA: Please let us know if you know where Larry or the parrot have been.

Meanwhile there has been a Kim Jong-Un sighting, another mystery, North Korea is displaying photos of the 32-year-old leader walking with cane. Are all the rumors of his demise now debunked? We'll take a closer look.

CUOMO: And forget about Kobani, ISIS now has its eyes on Baghdad. But can the terror group even hope to take the Iraqi capital? The answer seems to be changing here in a disturbing way. We'll give you why, next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CUOMO: We have new information for new the mystery of where is Kim Jong-Un. For the first time in more than a month, we're getting a look at him in public. North Korea's state media releasing photos of their supreme leader during two official visits. He's seen walking with a cane, by the way. We'll talk about that.

Now, Kim Jong-Un's absence from public view has fuelled rumors and speculation about his health or maybe a possible coup. The question is, will those rumors now be put to rest by these photos?

CNN's Paula Hancocks is following developments for us from Seoul.

Good morning.

PAULA HANCOCKS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Chris.

Well, it appears that Kim Jong-Un is back and he's back with a smile and a walking stick. You see him here in these photos, with a cane, which would seem to support many analysts' expectations that he did in fact have health issues. More than five weeks, he was away from public view, which for him was particularly unusual as he is certainly not camera-shy.

And we have had the South Korean government saying they believe the leadership was intact. They thought there was just health issues, and I also spoke to a defector a couple of hours ago, who used to be very high up in North Korea. And he said if you thought the rumors were far-fetched here in internationally, then inside North Korea they were even worse. He said some people even thought that Kim Jong-Un had died.

So, clearly, what we're seeing today is more North Korean broadcasts than usual. We're seeing more news bulletins, that we've seen recently. Clearly, the regime wants to show that he is back. They want to show internationally and domestically, that Kim Jong-Un is in the seat once again.

So, certainly an interesting development. We haven't got a date on these photos. We don't know exactly when they were taken. We don't know when this field guidance, as it's called, took place. And we haven't seen any moving pictures yet -- Chris. CUOMO: The date of the photo would be the most important thing. So,

we have to get on that. Paula Hancocks, thank you very much.

Let's bring in CNN global affairs analyst, the managing editor of "Quartz", Mr. Bobby Ghosh.

Let's talk about that. You know, when our screen comes back to life, the idea of we don't know when these photos were taken. There's nothing about them that's suggestive of any real-time stamp, right?

BOBBY GHOSH, CNN GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST: He's not holding up a newspaper, either. But the fact that they were put out early this morning in Korea, they want us to think that this is very recent, that this is taking place in the last couple of days. He does, the fact that he's using the cane is significant. He wasn't seen like this in previous photos.

CUOMO: So, the cane is the best indication that this is recent.

GHOSH: It is relatively new. It is certainly more recent than the last batch of pictures that they officially put out or the last video we saw of him. He was hobbling a little bit in the last video we saw. There was an admission that he was, he was unwell. That he was in discomfort I think was the official language.

Now, it's out in the open. This is important, because these pictures, as we were saying earlier, these are very, very carefully choreographed. There is nothing spontaneous about it.

Even the angle in which his hand is positioned here, all of this is very careful. So, the fact that they're showing his cane now means that this is an open acknowledgement that he's not in the -- in 100 percent good health.

CUOMO: What is the most reasonable speculation about why he hasn't been in view? Do we just go with the obvious, he's got a cane, he must have a health issue, even though he's very young? Or do you put any value in these darker theories about coups and what-not?

GHOSH: I don't put a lot of value in the coup theory, mainly because a coup in a country like that, where three generations of Kims that rule the country would be seismic, would be a huge event. And there would be far more indications than this.

If this were the first of several clues of a coup, that, yes, that might sort of add up to a picture. But if this was the only one, I think that's -- that's probably unlikely.

The nature of his illness, on the other hand, that we don't know there have been speculation ranging from gout, from -- you know, the idea that he was so overweight that he sort of broke his ankles? There was some speculation that he was missing because he had had liposuction, because he's famously overweight. But those will continue to bubble on until we've had some more official word.

CUOMO: Any relevance to who he's surrounded by? I mean, we know so little about the personnel in the government there, or the regime. Do you know any of these people?

GHOSH: I believe this is marshal -- I beg your pardon. I believe --

CUOMO: That's how secretive they are, is that a zone as you try to identify them.

GHOSH: Here we go.

CUOMO: So, right here, this man you were talking about, this man right here?

GHOSH: I believe this is Marshal Hwang, his number two, he's changed his number two a few times. But the fact that he's appearing along with him is sort of indicates that this is something very official. That this is a very important event that both the number one and the number two of the Korean government are there.

His sister, remember there was some speculation that his sister might have been taking over from him. She's no longer seen in these photos.

CUOMO: She's not in the photos.

GHOSH: Yes, so that puts that rumor to rest.

CUOMO: So, the baseline curiosity is why wasn't he around? Why does that matter to us? Could this be as simple as, this is someone who craves relevance so badly that this was a great way to get some, by creating a mystery that he wound up resolving himself?

GHOSH: The -- it's not so much what we think of did, but what his people think of it. This is a state in which the individual dominates every aspect of him. He dominates every aspect of a North Korean's life. And for him to be missing for 40 days is a very big deal.

For North Koreans, whether they love him or hate him doesn't matter. He's the one common denominator. Every day you open the newspaper and you see a picture of Kim. That brings a certain kind of reassurance, if you like. That as oppressive as the regime is, at least it is stable.

For him to be away from the North Korean public eye was a much bigger deal than say being away from the international public eye. So, this -- as we heard Paula say there -- it's as much about reassuring North Koreans that, I'm OK.

CUOMO: So, given what you're saying, it's odd that they put him with the cane at all. Didn't need to.

GHOSH: That's a big, big deal. His grandfather famously had a very large tumor at the back of his neck. We almost never saw that because the photographs were so carefully choreographed.

This is -- this suggests that they're acknowledging that he's unwell and perhaps in a few days he'll get rid of the cane and then they will say, oh, he's made this great recovery. We'll see.

CUOMO: Bobby Ghosh, thank you very much.

GHOSH: Anytime.

CUOMO: Alisyn?

CAMEROTA: Okay, Chris.

U.S.-led airstrikes pounding ISIS targets in Iraq, but it's not stopping the terror group from marching towards Baghdad. We'll show you how close they are to the capital and to the airport this morning.

And politics getting downright ugly, literally. Wait until you hear what a New Hampshire congressman said about a female incumbent's looks. That's ahead.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CAMEROTA: Welcome back to NEW DAY.

Now, to the battle against ISIS. President Obama meeting with defense chiefs from the U.S. and 20 other countries, to focus on the terror group as fighters advance in Syria and Iraq. ISIS continuing its push towards Iraq's capital, coming within 15 miles of the city's airport, and taking a strategically important military base in Anbar province.

So, what's next?

Let's ask retired Lieutenant Colonel Rick Francona, CNN military analyst and former U.S. military attache in Syria.

Colonel, great to have you with us.

So, here's the map of the region that we're talking about. Show us the hot spot. Let's walk over to Iraq, because this first red dot here is Hit. The city of Hit, why is this significant?

LT. COL. RICK FRANCONA (RET), CNN MILITARY ANALYST: This is a military installation that's been surrounded for several days and now is completely evacuated and ISIS owns it now.

CAMEROTA: Strategically important?

FRANCONA: Well, it's on the Euphrates River Valley. So, now, it gives ISIS control of almost the entire Euphrates Valley from Baghdad up to the Iraqi border, all the way up almost to the Turkish border.

And any place that's left that's they bypassed on their drive to Baghdad, they're going back to get now. That's what happened here. They were already south of this. They came back and took it.

CAMEROTA: The green top here is the Baghdad airport. That would obviously be disastrous for them to get control of that. Do we know how close they are to it?

FRANCONA: Yes, they're about eight to 15 miles, you hear differing things, depending on -- the lines move as the Iraqis try to push them back, there's a lot of air power going in there. So they fall back. They regroup and they re-attack.

This is a lot of heavy fighting going on here on both sides, but the Iraqi military has not been capable of push them back very far.

CAMEROTA: What are the chances are that they get the airport?

FRANCONA: It's looking better and better for ISIS, that's the problem. And General Dempsey has said we will not let that happen. So, we're using the helicopters, there are six Apaches stationed there.

We're using helicopters in a close air support role, with the Iraqi force to prevent that from happening. We're not real confident in the Iraqi military capability to do that. That leaves a big gap in our planning.

There's 1,600 American troops at the Baghdad airport. Are they going to get involved? That's the question.

CAMEROTA: Wow.

So, the next red dot, next to the green, that is Baghdad proper. We had talked to our correspondents on the ground yesterday who said that inside, there's not that much fear that ISIS will take Baghdad because the Iraqi army is still in force there, and there are 8 million people there.