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CNN Wolf Blitzer Reports

Firefighters in West Battling Not Only Fires but Heat and Exhaustion

Aired August 16, 2001 - 20:00   ET

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

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: Tonight, the West on fire. Dozens of blazes are sweeping across more than half a million acres in the parched Western states. Hard-hit Oregon calls out the National Guard. We'll go live to the fireline.

Cancer patients in the Kansas City area are dealt another blow. A pharmacist is accused of drastically diluting their potentially lifesaving drugs. How widespread is the danger? I'll ask health care consumer advocate Dr. Sidney Wolfe.

A group which believes we're descended from aliens wants to clone human beings. Is it being funded by a man who wants to clone his dead infant? And is this their secret laboratory? I'll speak live with the journalist who uncovered the site.

And more sharks spotted along the coast. We'll tell you where.

Good evening. I'm Wolf Blitzer, reporting tonight from Washington.

The numbers are staggering, 21,000 firefighters are battling 42 major fires that already have scorched half a million acres in 10 Western states. Oregon's governor today declared a drought emergency and mobilized 120 National Guard troops to help fight the fires.

And that may be just the beginning. On the front lines, the firefighters are battling not only the fires but heat and exhaustion. And that's our top story.

It's a familiar drama, summer wildfires raging in the West. In Idaho, authorities say crews are growing weary after long hours battling flames all week. This year, that state alone has had more than 1,000 fires. And firefighters fear another round of dry lightning could quickly make things even the worse.

Next door in Oregon, the state's worst fire threat is near Monument, where 150 residents are waiting to hear whether they'll need to flee. Here's a look at crews this week working to make sure extinguished fires don't reignite. Since yesterday, one fire in the area has doubled in size.

To find out where all those fires are and what's fanning the flames, let's go live to Karen Maginnis at the CNN Weather Center in Atlanta.

Karen, tell us how bad the situation is out there.

KAREN MAGINNIS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: It's fairly bad. We have seen pretty much a month's worth of heat, so it's really dried things out across much of the West. There is an area of low pressure situated out here essentially in the Gulf of Alaska. That weather system in particular is not going to make it into the West, but we might see little disturbances moving around that low and usher in some troughiness across the West.

Essentially, what we've seen is a pretty big ridge of high pressure across this region. That dome of high pressure has not budged a bit, and that's why these temperatures have been exceptionally hot.

Well, this ridge of high pressure looks like it is going to be shifting just a bit more to the East. As you can see as we look towards the Pacific Northwest, not a lot going on. We don't really start to see precipitation until we head down towards the Four Corners states, and that's where we start to pick up more moisture. It has been exceedingly hot.

Now, here's kind of a different view. Ridge of high pressure shifts, we get a little disturbance that rotates off of this area of low pressure, and that will reinforce some colder air or cooler air. Unfortunately, Wolf, it looks like those winds are going to be kicking up even as we go into Saturday. Cooler weather, but gusty winds. Kind of a bad combination.

BLITZER: Karen Maginnis in Atlanta, thank you very much.

And firefighters are stretched to the limit in some areas. CNN's Gina London is on the front lines of one desperate battle near Medford, Oregon. And she joins us now live.

Gina, tell us how bad the situation is where you are.

GINA LONDON, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, it's interesting, Wolf, because this is a situation that the officials here tell us is actually stable, in the sense that they are being able to hold the line. But they're only able to do that with the help of the equipment you see behind me and around me.

This is a field that has been transformed into an air base, if you will. There are 10 helicopters that are lifting off from here, going over to actually fight the Quartz Fire by bringing in cargo and some equipment. But of course, most important, thousands of gallons of water being dropped on the blaze at a time.

BLITZER: Gina, is it likely that the experts out there that suggest that this is going to get worse, looking at the weather patterns that Karen Maginnis just described?

LONDON: Right, well, that, Wolf, of course, is the key, and the people here are telling us that so far, they're hopeful that the weather patterns won't change to disfavor. But the situation is very dire. It's been a drought here for weeks. That's what's led, of course, to the situation, why it's so dry. And there's a very low level of humidity here as well. And it doesn't look in the forecast that there's going to be any rain here, at least not a substantial amount, soon.

There are already 5,600 acres of fire here that have been -- that scorched the earth, administration there are more than 1,800 people, Wolf, who are fighting the blaze right now. But it still may not be enough.

BLITZER: Gina London in Oregon, be careful out there. Thanks very much for joining us.

And in other news, in Kansas City, hundreds of people have called an FBI hotline for cancer patients who believe they may have received diluted drugs.

Pharmacist Robert Courtney appeared before a federal magistrate yesterday and was ordered held without bond. The FBI is going through records seized from Courtney's pharmacy. He's accused of dispensing the chemotherapy drugs Taxol and Gemzar in severely diluted form, with potency levels ranging from about 39 percent to less than 1 percent of prescribed strengths.

Courtney is charged with one felony count of diluting the drugs.

The FBI says homicide or manslaughter charges are possible if the adulterated drugs can be linked to a death. Courtney's lawyer says he'll plead not guilty.

Doctors and pharmacists say the dilution of these chemotherapy drugs could have very serious consequences for patients. And to help us measure up the impact of this case, find out how widespread drug tampering may be, I'm joined now by Dr. Sidney Wolfe. He's the consumer advocate and director of Public Citizen's Health Research group.

Dr. Wolfe, thanks for joining us.

DR. SIDNEY WOLFE, DIRECTOR, HEALTH RESEARCH GROUP: Good evening.

BLITZER: And just so that our viewers know, this is Taxol. Actually it's a saline solution in here, but it looks like this, and it's a relatively nice-sized bottle. One of the chemotherapy drugs. And this is Gemzar. It looks like this. You go to the pharmacy.

Just to give our viewers some perspective, one dosage of, proper dosage of this costs anywhere from $500 to $1,000, so potentially there's a lot of opportunity for theft in this business.

WOLFE: That's absolutely right. By stealing in, in other words, not putting enough drug in the bag, the pharmacist can make a huge amount of money, violate federal law and so forth. And it's also stealing from the patient, this -- a patient who's responding to the right amount of drug and only gets a tenth or a hundredth amount of the drug that they need may wind up having the cancer come back and may wind up dying.

Understandably, patients who have used things from this pharmacy wonder, Did it happen to me?

One of the questions is, is a pharmacist like this being adequately disciplined? He's in jail now. We have no idea whether he's lost his license or not. This is a very serious thing. The states regulate pharmacists just like they regulate doctors. This doctor -- this pharmacist has clearly violated the state practice act. What's going to happen to him?

BLITZER: So the question is this. Is this an isolated incident in Kansas City, or are there bigger problems that perhaps we're not paying attention to out there?

WOLFE: My colleague, Dr. Larry Sasek (ph), who's on our staff, who is a pharmacist, tells me that the pharmacy boards in general do about as bad a job as the medical boards. They don't discipline enough. For example, very recently, there was a pharmacist out near San Francisco who put together a solution, a supposedly sterile solution of cortisone, for injection into patients. Thirteen patients, from the batch that he made up, have been hospitalized. Five have developed meningitis, and three of them died.

He is still practicing pharmacy. He still has his pharmacy license. Imagine what a difference it would make to other pharmacists, what a deterrent effect it would have if people like the person -- Dr. -- Mr. Courtney, the pharmacist that we talked about with the cancer drugs, or the pharmacist out in the Bay area, lost their license for this.

We need more discipline over pharmacists, particularly when they do things like this.

BLITZER: And the potential for fraud, just to make it clear to our viewers, is not just for cancer drugs, it's for a lot of other drugs as well.

WOLFE: Any time a pharmacist has to mix up a solution and you depend on them to put in this much, but they only put in this much, there can be fraud, and patients can be harmed.

BLITZER: The profit motive is there if he wants to steal. But let -- give us some practical advice. A lot of our viewers get prescriptions filled. What should they be doing to protect themselves?

WOLFE: One of the things they should be doing is making sure that their state pharmacy board is doing an adequate job disciplining pharmacists. Most of them, like most medical boards, are not doing a good job. When a doctor says, You should have this amount of this drug, have the doctor write it down on a piece of paper and give it to you, even though the pharmacist is going to be filling it and giving it to the doctor.

You need to be in the loop, because no one is going to be more concerned and more affected by fraud and giving the wrong lowest amount of drug instead of the highest amount of drug than the patients. The patient should, every time a doctor says, We think that you should have this drug, have the doctor write down for you, not just for the pharmacist, the amount of the drug, the name of the drug.

There are also confusion sometimes over this drug is prescribed but that drug is filled. There are lots of errors, some intentional, which this one looks like, some unintentional, which result in harm to patients. Patients really have to beware.

We don't discipline enough doctors, we don't discipline enough pharmacists. Hospitals get away with dumping patients out of their emergency rooms. We wind up putting out a lot of information on our Web site, citizen.org, to try and inform people of some of the people that have done some of these things that harm patients.

BLITZER: It's practical advice. Dr. Sidney Wolfe, thank you so much for joining us. And we'll be continuing to monitor this story as well. Thank you very much.

And in other news, the debate over Social Security is heating up. The Bush administration says it will change some traditional accounting practices. That would free up billions of dollars in revenue and allow the president to keep his promise not to touch the Social Security surplus.

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer says the Office of Management and Budget, the number-crunching arm of the White House, will change the way the government counts payroll taxes.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ARI FLEISCHER, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: We found that there should be more money attributed to Social Security than was previously thought. In other words, Social Security had been shortchanged in 1998 and 1999 and 2000. More money came in for Social Security than the government accountants thought, and that'll be fully and fairly reflected.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLITZER: Democrats are accusing the White House of shuffling numbers to hide the impact of the president's tax cut.

We just learned that Republican Representative Floyd Spence of South Carolina has died. Last week he underwent surgery to remove a blood clot from his brain. Doctors had expected him to recover, but he took a turn for the worse just hours after the operation. He had been in Congress since 1971. Floyd Spence, dead at 73.

The search for a secret cloning lab, coming up. We'll talk to the reporter who tracked it down and take a peek inside.

Also, a dangerous close call on a Dallas runway. Details right after the break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BLITZER: Welcome back.

While Congress has been moving toward an outright ban on human cloning, a group which says humans were created by aliens has pushed ahead with its efforts to clone humans.

Brigitte Boisselier, a scientist affiliated with the Raelian group, has spoken of a secret laboratory and a big investor. An investigative journalist has uncovered the secret lab inside a rundown former school on the outskirts of Charleston, West Virginia. And a West Virginia politician named Mark Hunt now says he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to lease the lab and buy equipment or the cloning experiment.

Hunt had hoped to clone tissue from his infant son, who died in 1999.

Joining me now from New York is freelance investigative journalist Joe Lauria, who broke the story for "The Sunday Times" of London. Joe, thanks very much for joining us.

Tell us how you got onto this story.

JOE LAURIA, INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER: Well, on July 4, the "Sunday Times" of London called me and asked me to find Brigitte Boisselier's secret cloning lab. She had left enormous clues in her testimony before the subcommittee of the House in March, the -- when the House was looking to get evidence for the bill they eventually passed to ban cloning.

She talked about her secret investor who had lost his son in a hospital mishap. He got a hole in his heart. He died in surgery. He won a malpractice suit -- she even released a letter with the testimony from this man, said that he was a local legislator, a successful lawyer, and that he wanted to get his son back.

With those clues in hand, I flew out to Las Vegas to meet with Brigitte for four -- for an hour interview in Vegas where she lives. I then went up to Syracuse, near where she was teaching. There had been some thought that maybe the lab was there. I thought perhaps it was in the desert of Nevada.

Those clues and those leads ran cold. Eventually I did some very hard work, database searches and interviewing, and I came across a story eventually, after about a month's work, in a database in a Charleston, West Virginia, newspaper, September 1999, about a politician who had lost his son in a hospital mishap. He had a hole in the heart, he died on this operating table, he won a malpractice suit.

And all the clues seemed to fit. I thought I had the man, then. Next was finding the lab. So I went down to Charleston, and I had a few places I went to I thought it might have been, and that wasn't the case. Came back to New York. I found a company called Bioserv (ph), Inc. She had said on her Web site that she created a secret company as well to do this, apart from Clonaid, which is the overall company that she's the scientific director of.

And Bioserv, Inc., is in the phone directory, it's in the phone book of Charleston. I rang the building manager there, and I chatted with him and asked if there was a lab in the building, and he said indeed there was. And he volunteered the information without my even asking him to tell me -- he asked me, "Do you know who rented the lab?" And I said no. And he said, "Mark Hunt, the politician." Well, I thought, that was it, I knew I had the story at that point.

BLITZER: Well, this is -- we're taking a look at the picture of that community center, which used to be a school. We saw the lab. It sort of looks like a high school chemistry lab. It didn't look very sophisticated to me. Is that misleading?

LAURIA: Well, I'm not a scientist. I've been asked this a lot. I don't know exactly what all that equipment is. I know what it is, but I'm not sure exactly what it could do and whether or not that's enough of it.

It looks like a high school because it was a high school. It was abandoned, and the people of that community, the 7,000 people, spent a lot of money to build that building up again, have a daycare center in there, they have plumbing and roofing companies, litigation services, a senior citizens' home.

In fact, it alarmed the people when they found out. They thought it -- they were making jokes in the community that it must be -- they must be cloning someone in there. Now they've stopped laughing, obviously.

But as far as the equipment goes, there's a centrifuge in there, looks like a copying machine which apparently can separate cell components. There's a ventilator that can create sterile conditions in which one can work on cells.

And there might be electric generation there, which would be necessary to fuse the nucleus from the cell of, in this case, Andrew Hunt, the dead child, the 10-month-old child, whose cells they froze immediately after his death in September of '99, to fuse that into the empty egg. In other words, the nucleus is removed from the women's egg, and fuse it in there with electricity.

I don't know if that equipment is there. That egg, then, would of course be implanted in a woman, a surrogate mother, and Brigitte's daughter is one of the ones who've come forward to try to volunteer to do that.

So whether that equipment can do it or not is unclear to me. There's apparently also a locked room off to the side, and it's not clear what's in there.

The FDA did go there, the police did call them in. The local police is in the same building, and they got suspicious. They called in, the FDA went in there, and I understand they made a deal with Boisselier and with Hunt. They would not reveal the location of the lab or the man's name who was trying to have this work done in exchange for them ceasing their work.

He kept his side of the bargain, she didn't. She went -- well, she didn't continue the work, but she went and gave many press interviews and said she would sue the FDA and challenge it all the way to the Supreme Court, saying that they did not have the authority or the jurisdiction to do this. Hunt wanted her to stop, he did not want her to sue. He was afraid his name would come out in the discovery process in any lawsuit.

So -- yes, I'm sorry.

BLITZER: Let me interrupt you for second. And what's the status right now? Are the police investigating? Is there any evidence that there are labs similar to this one anyplace else as far as you could...

LAURIA: No, there isn't...

BLITZER: ... you could learn?

LAURIA: ... she said -- I'm sorry. She said that she would not -- she wants to open another lab somewhere in the U.S., and she has one somewhere else. It could be South Korea. There seems to be some evidence for that.

The -- no one is investigating it right now. They've been evicted, and they're going to be taking that equipment out of there. And the work stopped anyway, because Mr. Hunt locked the door on that two weeks ago when he saw that she was starting to say she wanted to sue and continue the work anyway.

So this lab is finished. But -- and we don't know exactly how far they've got. He said they were testing the viability of his son's DNA. He's very serious about this. He still wants to have his son cloned. He said he'll go elsewhere, he'll spend his last penny in order to do this. And he already spent $500,000.

BLITZER: Joe Laurie, doing some excellent footwork, freelance journalist and investigative journalist, thanks so much for joining us from our New York bureau.

LAURIA: Thank you. Thank you very much.

BLITZER: Thank you. And this footnote, CNN contacted Clonaid scientific director Brigitte Boisselier, and this is her statement. "Clonaid has an agreement with several partners, and we do not unveil the identity of any of them. We repeatedly attempted to contact Mark Hunt, who was unavailable for comment."

Up next, guess who's swimming off Florida's Gulf Coast once again? What the shallow waters reveal when we come back.

Plus, revealing the weakness of this trusty gadget. If you own one, you definitely want to stay tuned. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) BLITZER: Welcome back.

Looking at our other top stories tonight, a close call at Dallas- Fort Worth Airport. The FAA confirms two planes almost collided this morning, at one point coming within 500 feet of one another. An air traffic controller reportedly cleared a Continental jet to cross the same runway that a Delta jet was using for takeoff.

In southern Germany, 32 U.S. Army paratroopers got hurt today in a parachuting accident. It happened during a training exercise which involved a large-scale parachute jump of 400 U.S. troops. Most of the injuries were limited to twisted ankles, but 10 paratroopers were hospitalized. The troops are part of the southern European task force based in Italy.

The summer of the shark continues in Florida. Today near Sarasota, scores of sharks were swimming in shallow water. One shark expert says it's possible the sharks were among the hundreds spotted Tuesday north of Tampa. He says the sharks move seasonally up and down the coast, and in the fall head south to warmer waters.

It's been a hot summer, so how do you cool off? If you're this 1,500-pound bull moose near Spokane, Washington, you do as the humans do and jump into the pool for a dip. After a few laps, it climbed out of the water, hopped the fence, and quietly returned to the wild.

Tonight on the Leading Edge, two spacewalking astronauts hung the first-ever experiments outside the International Space Station. Two hundred and fifty miles over earth, the astronauts attached a bulky ammonia coolant to Station Alpha and set up trays holding hundreds of scientific samples. They'll be retrieved next year to study the environment of space.

If you carry one of these, we have a warning for you. Security experts say handheld computers like the popular Palm Pilot are not safe from hackers. Personal digital assistants, or PDAs, as they're called, are not designed to be secure, so, experts warn, storing critical or confidential information is very risky business.

From handheld computers to hands-free cell phones, a University of Utah study finds hands-free phones distract drivers just about as much as handheld phones. This supports other research that finds simply talking on the phone while driving poses a risk on the road.

Up next, I'll open our mailbag. Many of you reacted to my interview last night with John Walsh, the host of "America's Most Wanted," and many of you read the excerpt from his new book we put up on our Web site. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BLITZER: Welcome back.

Time now to open our mailbag. Many of you reacted to my interview last night with John Walsh, the host of "America's Most Wanted." Scott from Houston had this for John. "Thanks for making our streets somewhat safer and partnering with the valuable resources we have in law enforcement."

Like many viewers, Bill from San Diego was grateful to us for posting an excerpt on my Web site from Walsh's new book. "It reflects the workings of a man whom I consider a great American hero." Henry from Texas, "What a powerful story. I now better understand what drives Mr. Walsh." Andrew in Auckland, New Zealand, "It was compelling reading. This bodes well enough for the rest of the book that I shall be ordering a copy tomorrow."

And finally, this nice note from Kimberly in Tulsa. "Thank you, Mr. Blitzer, for your wonderfully refreshing program. The attorney I work for recommended I watch CNN instead of the other network. I'm just sorry I didn't listen to him sooner."

Thank you, Kimberly.

Remember, I want to hear from you. Please e-mail me at wolf@cnn.com. And you can go to my Web site to read my daily column. That's at cnn.com/wolf.

Please stay with CNN throughout the night. Roseanne is Larry King's guest at the top of the hour. Up next, Greta Van Susteren. She's standing by to tell us what she has. Greta?

GRETA VAN SUSTEREN, HOST, "THE POINT WITH GRETA VAN SUSTEREN": Wolf, Dominick Dunne is back, and he's had his share of fame, glory, success, and tragedy. He's going to talk about the Levy problem tonight.

Plus, we're going to talk to a man who's very familiar with the pharmacist investigation in the state of Kansas.

And Bob Frank is going to join us to bring us the latest from Modesto, California.

Wolf?

BLITZER: Good lineup, Greta. I'll be watching, as I always do.

And tomorrow night, I'll talk with President Reagan's son Michael Reagan about his sister's legacy and his father's battle with Alzheimer's.

Until then, thanks very much for watching. I'm Wolf Blitzer in Washington. "THE POINT WITH GRETA VAN SUSTEREN" begins right now.

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