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Experts: Common Allergy Medication's Risks Outweigh Its Usefulness; NASA's Quest to Create a Time Scale Measurement System; Texas State Reps Hold Hearing After Release of New Congressional Map. Aired 3:30-4p ET

Aired August 01, 2025 - 15:30   ET

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

[15:30:00]

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: Doctors and researchers are urging people to move on from a very popular allergy drug best known by the brand name Benadryl. Experts from Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, San Diego say the drug should at minimum be moved behind the counter at pharmacies and patients guided towards safer second generation alternatives like Claritin, Zyrtec or Allegra.

BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN HOST: The review notes that Benadryl and other drugs with the same active ingredient can cause sedation, cognitive impairment and in some cases, dangerous cardiac effects. The study also highlights a possible link between long-term use and dementia as well as more pronounced risks in kids.

Allergist and immunologist Dr. Neeta Ogden joins us now. She's the spokesperson for the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology. Doctor, thanks for being with us. Do you share this concern over Benadryl?

DR. NEETA OGDEN, ALLERGIST AND IMMUNOLOGIST: Yes, thank you for having me. And I most definitely do. And I think I, like many allergy experts have felt this for years that there's simply an overuse happening of Benadryl. Benadryl has become synonymous with allergy.

And so we're finding that our patients are basically reaching for Benadryl every time they suspect a food allergy or seasonal allergies or a rash. And the reality is, is that there are far better options out there that they should be aware of.

And it does have those side effects that you mentioned, many of which can be dangerous in children and elderly people as well. Things like sedation, over sedation, especially if you're following some of these boxes that say take it every four to six hours. And then it can have a paradoxical effect in children and the elderly where it makes them agitated and disoriented, for example.

So I do share this and I'm glad that it's coming to light because I often think this every day in my practice when people, the first thing they say is I took Benadryl for something they could have taken a different drug that would have been far more effective.

KEILAR: OK. So talk to us, you know, I've heard just talking to friends, talking to people, they might have some kind of slight food allergy. It's not a full blown thing where they'd have an EpiPen or they might just have a worry, right? That they could, they carry Benadryl with them. What would you then instead suggest to them should be what they're thinking of for treatment if they're running into a food allergy or if they are someplace where someone does start to have some kind of allergy to a food?

OGDEN: Look, I'm not saying that Benadryl is not something that people should use at all, but I think that they need to use it with a certain amount of education because for example, with food allergy, we know that you raise a really good point. There's a spectrum. If it's a slight reaction, what do you do?

If it's more severe reaction, we want you reaching for your EpiPen because that's what's going to save your life. People taking too much of Benadryl in an emergency may actually become sedated and not if they're by themselves, for example, may not know what next steps to take, which is a worrisome, you know, situation.

So the best thing that you can do is if you have a food allergy, you should be treated by a board certified allergist who can give you a food allergy action plan. And that is going to tell you when to use Benadryl, when to use those other second generation antihistamines and when to use your EpiPen. And that's what should really guide what you should be doing.

SANCHEZ: Talk to us about these other alternatives and what their advantages are. What is it that makes them different on an ingredient level?

OGDEN: I think the big thing that we're talking about is the second generation antihistamines, and they have less side effects, especially the sedation thing. So they work on peripheral receptors, antihistamine receptors more than Benadryl, which again, like I said, crosses the blood brain barrier and leads to these central nervous systems, like things that can make you more sedated and disoriented. So we don't see that with these other medications like the Zyrtec, Allegra, and Claritin.

They also last longer. Benadryl sort of wears out after four to six hours, whereas those are 24 hours effective. So those are the main things that how they can be different.

And we as allergy community, allergy experts are almost always going to recommend them over Benadryl when treating things like seasonal allergies, hives, part of the food allergy reaction. You know, there's many things that you take if you're having a reaction, and it's almost always going to be one of those.

KEILAR: Such an important conversation, everyone, I swear, has Benadryl in their cabinets. And ragweed season, which you know I'm obsessed with, Boris, is just around the season -- just around the corner, ragweed season is. So Dr. Neeta Ogden, thank you so much for taking us through that.

OGDEN: Thank you for having me. KEILAR: I'm really obsessed with ragweed.

SANCHEZ: Don't get her started on ragweed.

KEILAR: You don't even want to know.

OK, four astronauts are on their way to the International Space Station after launching on the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft. The NASA crew 11 mission sending four astronauts up for a scientific expedition after a literal last minute cancellation Thursday because of weather.

SANCHEZ: The crew is going to spend about six months on the ISS conducting research to prepare for human exploration beyond low earth orbit. It's important work as agencies look to take humans to the moon and beyond. And that includes a new way of developing a method of measuring time in space.

CNN actually sent me to the moon, sort of, to explain how this is going to work.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

SANCHEZ: NASA is aiming to return astronauts to the moon as soon as 2026 for the first time in five decades. But returning to the moon raises a surprisingly tricky question.

How do you keep track of time in space?

On the moon, time passes slightly differently than it does back home on earth. This is because of what scientist Albert Einstein called general relativity, or the theory that gravity affects space and time. For perspective, let's put this in earth terms.

General relativity tells us that gravity slows time down. This means that seconds tick by imperceptibly faster at the top of a mountain than they do in low valleys.

And when we leave earth's gravity, the difference can get even greater. On the moon, what we think of as a standard 24 hour earth day is 56 microseconds shorter than it is on earth. And while this tiny number might not seem like much, it could compound and possibly lead to significant errors over time.

Precision timekeeping isn't just about understanding how time works on the moon. It's essential for establishing the systems that make lunar missions possible. This is why NASA and its international partners are on a quest to create a new, quote, time scale or system of time measurement on the moon.

And if scientists can pull it off on the moon, it could be a pivotal next step in sending humanity even deeper into the solar system.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

SANCHEZ (on camera): It's really a fascinating problem to have. Also, I underdress for the moon, I think. Next time I'll wear more layers.

KEILAR: I think that was great. You were everywhere on the moon.

SANCHEZ: Mountains, valleys, craters. Yes.

KEILAR: Was that really cool to do?

SANCHEZ: It was head spinning.

KEILAR: Very neat.

SANCHEZ: Way colder than I expected.

KEILAR: Bring layers, as mothers say.

Texas state lawmakers holding a hearing right now on a new congressional map that could give Republicans five more congressional seats. We'll have more on this controversial move.

[14:40:00]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SANCHEZ: Happening now, the Texas House of Representatives is holding a public hearing after releasing a new congressional map that could give Republicans a chance to pick as many as five seats in next year's midterms. The state's legislature is expected to approve it in the coming days.

And a new Politico report puts it this way, quote, The GOP's maps indicate the party is bullish on Latino voters continuing their rightward political shift, even without Trump atop the ballot. It's a move that doubles down on a strategy Republicans were already implementing across the country, targeting heavily Hispanic House districts.

Let's discuss with Mike Madrid. He's the author of the book "The Latino Century" and a co-founder of the Lincoln Project.

Mike, thank you so much for joining us. What do you make of this take from Politico that Republicans are betting big on Latino voters? Is it a gamble? What are the odds that this pays off?

MIKE MADRID, CO-FOUNDER, THE LINCOLN PROJECT: Boris, great to be with you. Look, yes, it's a very big gamble and it's gambling on an untested assumption, which is because there has been this rightward shift in the last three election cycles that we are undergoing some sort of racial realignment. Most of the data suggests that there's overwhelming sense amongst this growing Latino vote against both parties, which has been demonstrated for the better part of 15 years.

Republicans are thinking that this is somehow a pro-Republican vote and there's no evidence to suggest that. In 2018, for example, in Trump's first midterm, Beto O'Rourke won three of the five new congressional districts that they're carving up. And the dynamics of 2018 are going to be probably by a factor of 10 worse for the Republicans heading into 2026.

So the idea that we're undergoing a racial realignment really is a misunderstanding of the underlying data.

SANCHEZ: So help us understand the underlying data. You've described this as being driven largely by economic concerns, right?

MADRID: Yes. And let's keep in mind, I think conventional wisdom suggests that because of the ICE raids and the overreach of the federal government during these crackdowns on the undocumented, that that is somehow driving Latino sentiments downward. The data, again, suggests that the collapse of Latino support that Trump enjoyed, and again, it was probably the shortest political honeymoon in history, began on what he called Liberation Day when he announced these massive global tariffs.

[14:45:04]

The financial markets started to get rattled and Latino voters, working class voters immediately started to flee away from him for the exact same reasons that they came towards him, which was his confidence in the economy, confidence in the government. Latinos are overwhelmingly by a wide margin, an economic pocketbook voter.

And all of the polling data that is coming out today, all of it, is suggesting that they now believe this is Trump's economy and the negatives on his economic support levels are just as bad as Joe Biden's was when he lost a historic share of this vote.

So again, this somehow belief that this is this rightward racial realignment that is happening with working class voters, it's not nearly enough time to suggest that that is the case, especially when you look back into recent history and show that Beto O'Rourke in a losing bid beats Ted Cruz in 2018 in three of these five districts. So big gamble, bad assumptions.

I think they're overreaching and probably making a very historic mistake here.

SANCHEZ: It doesn't seem like you're putting a lot of stake into the immigration issue being a driving force. And I've spoken to some Democrats who are trying to find a way to message more to Latino voters. The administration sort of leaned into during the last election cycle, this false premise that they'd only be rounding up violent criminals.

We've seen the opposite of that, right. How do you think that might play in the upcoming midterm election cycle? Is there ground there for Democrats to make a counter argument?

MADRID: Boris, that's exactly the right question to be asking as strategists kind of try to define what the boundaries of these borders should be and understand how real this realignment or this shifting, rightward shift is actually for both parties. Let's start very quickly with the Republicans. Most Latinos now are negative on Donald Trump's border security

measures, believing one, the problem has overwhelmingly been solved, but more importantly, that there's been a considerable significant overreach on these problems.

I think we're all familiar with the Gallup poll in the last couple of weeks that show the highest levels of support for immigrants broadly, meaning largely legal migrants, but the distinction between legal and illegal has been fumbled by the Trump administration themselves because so many U.S. citizens have been rounded up, so many families have been broken up, and that leads us to the Democrats.

There's this orthodoxy in the Democratic Party that it is immigration that is driving the mobilization and turnout of Latino voters. It's not. It never has. It's always been a secondary consideration. Boris, there has never been a credible poll of Latino voters in the last 30 years suggesting that anything but the economy was the number one issue by a wide measure.

That's why Kamala Harris lost. That's why Biden's number -- lost about an eight-point share in 2020 when he won the election of Hispanics. So this trend line has been happening for some time, and if Democrats rely on just immigration, if they rely on just anti-Trump sentiment, they will be making the same mistake that they did in 2018, where a good midterm year turned into three successive historic losses of Latinos because they did not have an upwardly mobile aspirational economic issue for these increasingly economic voters.

SANCHEZ: Mike Madrid, always appreciate the conversation. Thanks for being with us.

So we are just minutes away from markets closing on a day that is showing a lot of red there on your screen. Investors reacting to a series of major economic headlines, new tariffs, weak job numbers, and this hour, the president firing the official responsible for keeping track of and publishing the nation's job reports. We'll discuss the implications in just moments.

[14:50:00]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KEILAR: Forty years ago, rock legends like Bob Geldof, Bono, and Sting took the stage to raise money for famine relief in Africa.

SANCHEZ: CNN's Bill Weir sat down with Geldof in the final episode of the CNN original series, "LIVE AID, WHEN ROCK AND ROLL TOOK ON THE WORLD."

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CNN WEIR, CNN CHIEF CLIMATE CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): In 1985, Bob Geldof sat down to watch the six o'clock BBC newscast in London.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Our correspondent Michael Burke has been back to Korem -- WEIR (voice-over): And little did he know that what he was about to watch would change his life and career forever. His first glimpse of widespread famine in Ethiopia.

BOB GELDOF, ROCK AND ROLL MUSICIAN: These elegant human beings, all that intellect, all that possibility, dying of hunger in biblical numbers. That's what he said, a biblical famine of biblical proportions. My partner began to cry, not sob.

I looked around to see and she had just tears. And she grabbed our baby and ran upstairs, almost as if she didn't want this infant to see the world that she was going to be in.

WEIR (voice-over): The next day, Bob called his friends across the music industry and convinced them to do something, to make a record, to raise money for famine relief.

GELDOF: So, by the end of the day, we had the Rats, Ultravox, Bandai Ballet, the police and probably Duran Duran. Everyone felt the shame, the disgust, the rage and the frustration of not being able to do something. It isn't enough just to find a charity box and do that.

[14:55:00]

And so that Christmas, that seven inch piece of plastic became the price of a life.

WEIR (voice-over): They sold over 11 million copies of that record and raised more than 125 million with Live Aid. Concerts that took place across London and Philadelphia with headliners that included Queen, David Bowie, U2 and many more. And a second charity concert called Live Aid in 2005, Geldof committed himself to a life of activism.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You both have a lot of money, both have a lot of fame. You don't need to be doing this. You don't need to be sitting in these meetings on and on and on, having a world leader fall asleep on you.

Why in the world are you doing this?

GELDOF: Usually he falls asleep. Because it works. Poco a poco.

Those terrible pictures that you rightly show on CNN, you look at that, the pornography of poverty trawling across America's teatime tables every night and people say it's hopeless, nothing can be done.

Wrong. You've been doing it 20 years. It does change.

WEIR (voice-over): Bill Weir, CNN New York.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

KEILAR: Nothing inspires like music. Be sure to tune in the final episode of "LIVE AID, WHEN ROCK AND ROLL TOOK ON THE WORLD" airs Sunday at 9 p.m. Eastern and Pacific only on CNN. SANCHEZ: The closing bell is just minutes away and it has been an eventful day, one which has led the president of the United States to fire the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Markets reacting to dismal jobs report.

KEILAR: That's right. And "THE ARENA" with Kasie Hunt starts after this short break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

KASIE HUNT, CNN HOST: Welcome to THE ARENA, good to have you with us on this Friday.

We're going to go straight to Wall Street. We are waiting on the closing bell. It marks another ugly day for stock. The Dow, S&P 500 and Nasdaq all into red today. The S&P and the Nasdaq on track to have their worst day since April. The Dow looking end its worst week in months. Giving reasons for the drop ...

END