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November 24, 2004

Host: Michael Grant
Topics:
· Flu vaccine shortage;
· Desert ecosystem study by ASU Center for Environmental Studies;
· Forest Roads
In-Studio Guests:
· Dr. Jonathan Weisbuch, Maricopa County Chief Health Officer;
· Charles Redman, Director, International Institute of Environmental Sustainability, Arizona State University;
· Rob Smith, Southwest Regional Ddirector, Sierra Club

>> Michael Grant:
Tonight on "Horizon", thousands of flu shots have been declined by the Maricopa County Health Department that at a time when potential exposure to the flu can increase during the holiday season. Plus, study of the desert ecosystem is one research project being conducted by the ASU Center for Environmental Studies. A large financial gift will launch a new ASU degree program in that area of study. And regions of national forest in Arizona are "roadless" under a ban that prohibits building new roads there. But a proposed federal forest plan would reverse that roadless rule. That's next on "Horizon".

>> Underwriter:
"Horizon" is made possible by the Friends of Channel 8, members who provide financial support to this Arizona PBS station. Thank you.

>> Michael Grant:
Good evening, welcome to "Horizon". I'm Michael Grant. This time of year one thing many people would be thankful for is a flu shot. But a nationwide shortage of flu vaccine has made that difficult for many people. And in Maricopa County 6,000 flu vaccine doses were passed up on by the county health department. Joining me now to talk about why that decision was made Maricopa County's chief health officer Dr. Jonathan Weisbuch. Doctor, good to see you again.

>> Dr. Jonathan Weisbuch:
Pleasure to be here. This is an interesting time.

>> Michael Grant:
Do you get grilled by the county board of supervisors next week?

>> Dr. Jonathan Weisbuch:
We're going to make the point that county policy for years has been that the private sector should be taking care of the flu problem. We have never wanted to be in competition with the private sector of medicine and I think when we learned a week or 10 days a go that the state was offering us 6,000 doses that we could purchase and that 200,000 doses were expected in the state to the doctors and to the private sector before the end of December and January, we were out of the business. If there's 200,000 doses in the private sector, there is no reason for us to expend, to do the work that we were doing over the last six weeks putting out the vaccine to the folks. It is a private sector issue, it is efficient for the private sector to do it and we expect that will be the case.

>> Michael Grant:
Normally the county would not be running the clinics and other operations to simply administer flu shots, correct?

>> Dr. Jonathan Weisbuch:
Very rarely have we done that. A year ago we had a vaccine program to administer 800 doses because there was a shortage. That is not our job, ours is to vaccinate children, programs for STDs, people with sexually transmitted diseases. We have a large tuberculosis center. Our job is not to compete with the private sector.

>> Michael Grant:
I think one of the things that people are struggling with, particularly where there is a lottery, why pass up 6,000 additional chances? You can't win if you don't play, but you can't win if you don't have a chance.

>> Dr. Jonathan Weisbuch:
The random selection process we used was done because we weren't sure that any more vaccine was going to get to people in the county and determining who was highest risk was probably done best by us. Once it became clear that another large volume of the vaccine would be available to the private practitioners and those who do this as a business, then it became clear we didn't need to be in that business anymore.

>> Michael Grant:
Why all of a sudden are there 200,000 additional doses available?

>> Dr. Jonathan Weisbuch:
Mike, I don't know exactly the answer to that. Except I do know that, when the Chyron system failed back in October, the CDC put a hold on all the other available vaccine. Said don't put any of this out. Some had been shipped. The State of Arizona actually had 22,000 doses that was in the works.
Michael Grant: I recall.

>> Dr. Jonathan Weisbuch:
So that was the doses that we had to work with. CDC has now released about 11 million more doses that were kind of being held. And we will get a proportion of that 11 million doses, the population of this state is about 2% of the country so we get about 2% of that 11 million, that's about 200,000 doses.

>> Michael Grant:
Is the hunch here that CDC and others have said the situation is more stable than we thought it would be so we're going to cut this stuff loose?

>> Dr. Jonathan Weisbuch:
I think so. I can't speak for CDC; I just don't know what their thinking has been. But I do know this. We have a certain number of people in the state who are at high risk, over 65, they have chronic illness or children with chronic disease.

>> Michael Grant:
In fact, we have a disproportionate number of those, compared to a lot of other states.

>> Dr. Jonathan Weisbuch:
From the asthma perspective. We have fewer old folks than other parts of the country but we do have a large number of asthma kids. We do have a proportion of individuals that require this vaccine. With the 200,000 doses coming, I think the state has indicated that those with the specific need who are elderly and with chronic illness can be served with that dose if they choose to go to their doctor and get the material. One of the things that has been interesting, children and mothers have not been bringing their children. We have lots of child vaccine available. That's being delivered to our child vaccination program. Those have had to have been cut back because of the effort for the special program that wrote in to say they need the vaccine.

>> Michael Grant:
A lot of stories about people trying to get it from the private sector and being apparently unsuccessful in doing so.

>> Dr. Jonathan Weisbuch:
That is true. Those stories are always disturbing. On the other hand, in our clinics where we have had approximately 6,000 doses available, our clinics have not been running 100% full. Around 25, 30% of the population we have asked to come in have not shown up for whatever reason. And we received letters back with our original letter inviting them to have a shot. They send it back saying, Give this to someone else, I already got the shot from my doctor. It looks as if people who are making request office their practitioners at least in some cases are able to get the vaccine. I think Cigna, for example, is providing vaccine to its people. I know we get the county, Cigna came over and gave us over 65 our shots.

>> Michael Grant:
It looks like we get a slow start to the flu season.

>> Dr. Jonathan Weisbuch:
It appears in both Maricopa County from our surveillance and across the country and in Canada that the flu epidemic that we expect every year or outbreak of flu that we expect every year is very, very minimal this year. We monitor here in Maricopa County school absences, work absences, the number of people who go through the Cigna emergency rooms and we monitor death records for those who have died from flu and flu-like symptoms. Our numbers are still very low. Now, that doesn't mean that we're not going to have more cases in the future.

>> Michael Grant:
Slower start.

>> Dr. Jonathan Weisbuch:
There's not a lot of disease in the country at large, so it's not as if it's moving toward us, not like the west Nile which came from the east and over the course came to the west. If you're a betting man or optimist as I am, you say this is going to be a low year.

>> Michael Grant:
Couldn't come at a better time.

>> Dr. Jonathan Weisbuch:
Couldn't come at a better time. Low year, even if the epidemic is delayed to January or February, the number of doses we have, if people will call their doctor, tell them they're interested, their doctor can order the doses and we'll have an adequate number of doses to be served.

>> Michael Grant:
Dr. Weisbuch, I appreciate the opportunity. Happy holiday.

>> Dr. Jonathan Weisbuch:
Thank you, Mike, I appreciate the opportunity to talk to you. All of you out there, who needs a vaccine, call your doctor.

>> Michael Grant:
A $15 million gift has been donated by Julie Ann Wrigley to Arizona State University. That grant will establish a new degree program at ASU, the International Institute of Environmental Sustainability. When the school is established, it will make ASU the first university in the world with a school fully dedicated to research, education and finding solutions to problems of sustaining life on earth. I discussed the new program with Chuck Redman, director of the new International Institute of Environmental Sustainability. Chuck, I've got international institute for -- I'm not sure I understand sustainability. Tell me what that is.

>> Chuck Redman:
All of us have our own definitions. We intend in an academic sort of way is how do we deal with our every day decisions, our government decisions so we can protect the environment and have the quality of life we want and bring everyone up and have economic development.

>> Michael Grant:
How does the ASU International Institute for Sustainability contrast to the Arizona International Institute for Environmental Studies?

>> Chuck Redman:
It doesn't have to be different, but I think the emphasis When we were the center for environmental studies we looked at is an a scientific endeavor, understand how it operates. With sustainability we are saying that, but in bigger sphere. We want to discover ways to influence policy makers, to discover economic strategies, to engage people interested in engineering and technology and architecture so that we can design a world that we want to live in 20 or 30 years from now. A simple definition of sustainability is treating the world as if we intended to stay.

>> Michael Grant:
This is the first one to focus exclusively on sustainability.

>> Chuck Redman:
What the vision is, and it's President Crow's vision that we share, is that this will eventually become a place for research, we will train people, be engaged in local, community and international solutions trying to find better ways to do things. It's the first time we put all of those together. There may be a research arm or an undergraduate teaching degree. We intend to have all these in one package because they all need to be together if we're going to train the next generation of people.

>> Michael Grant:
This will grant master's and Ph.D. degrees?

>> Chuck Redman
: As you know, we have to ask a lot of people's permission before we do that, so we will start that process during the coming semester. It's a two to three year process. At the end of that time, we intend to be a full operations school by that.

>> Michael Grant:
2007.

>> Chuck Redman:
We intend to start to engage people in looking at better ways to understand us and better ways to take action.

>> Michael Grant:
Why Julie Ann Wrigley's interest in environmental studies?

>> Chuck Redman:
Julie is a wonderful and exciting person, and if you hear her story, she has had a long time interest in the environment, in conservation and in supporting organizations engaged in that largely in California and Idaho, where she has homes. But this commitment in her relationship with ASU, which is a couple years old, has taken on a new dimension, and she is committed to not just conservation but to looking to new solutions where we can have economic development and environmental conservation.

>> Michael Grant:
Now, you and your colleagues recently got a $6.9 million research grant for the water management in the 9th year of a drought. I can't think of better timing.

>> Chuck Redman:
It's been a good autumn. This is a new project from the national science foundation. The key to the project -- there's both a scientific end and applied end, and the scientific end is to bring together people to say how can we make better decisions knowing the world is uncertain. We still have to make plans. The drought may be over in the 9th year or it may go 19 years and we have to find ways to understand how we can hedge our risks and maximize our opportunities. This center is devoted to that. For our own experience, it's an both an environmental project but also a project trying to work with community people and policy makers to find ways we can help them and bring science and new knowledge into the decision-making process.

>> Michael Grant:
You need sound public policy, mandating efficient uses of water, does this somehow go beyond those normal kinds of strategies?

>> Chuck Redman
: This is a five-year project, if we had all the answers in the first month, we would be in a different place. Let me give you some guesses on this. Part of the issue is -- we have a lot of water here, but we use all the water we have. It's all taken out of the river; all distributed, a lot of farming, a lot of industry, a lot of residences. The question is going forward as the city gets bigger, there's more requirements for residential water use, where does it come from and how do you develop policies to move it from one sector to the other? There are some big issues confronting the state of Arizona whether we want to move water from one region to the other. These involve current laws, policies, political decisions, as well as those technology and science decisions. We want to help in the process. We won't make decisions but we want to bring more information to the process.

>> Michael Grant:
Is part of that assistance, perhaps, dealing with decision makers in terms of okay, once you land on what you think is a good plan of attack, here's how you go out and try to convince people that it is in fact a good plan of attack?

>> Chuck Redman:
We're not running for public office, so I'm not sure we're going to be able to quite do that, but communication is a huge part of it and part would be how we communicate to the decision makers the alternatives and the implications. One of the exciting new ways, another announcement just a week old, the decision theater which is the 3-D environment where we hope to bring this kind of information to a giant wrap-around Imax screen. And give them some chances to view in advance the implications of these decisions and hopefully bring it to public groups, school and that may help convince the public which looks more promising.

>> Michael Grant:
Chuck Redman, congratulations, and best of luck on the institute.

>> Chuck Redman:
Thank you very much, Michael.

>> Michael Grant:
Speaking of environmental sustainability, more than a million acres of national forest system land in Arizona are currently banned from having roads built on them under a "roadless rule" enacted in the final days of the Clinton administration. But a new roadless area conservation rule proposed by President Bush would drop the uniform man on forest road construction and allow local officials to shape policy. Supporters of that plan say it would give land managers flexibility and would better serve local needs. Opponents, including some conservation groups, are concerned about habitat loss as well as timber, mining and oil and gas exploration companies having access to the nation's forests. The forest service was invited on the program and made a concerted effort to appear, but was unable to provide a participant for the discussion. Joining me now is Rob Smith, southwest regional director of the Sierra Club. Rob, good to see you again.

>> Rob Smith:
Good to be here.

>> Michael Grant:
Do we have a roadless rule? Because the administration says it was enjoined about three months after President Clinton locked it in.

>> Rob Smith:
It's been challenged in court, but the court has upheld it so far. I think the reason is because the original rule involves 600 different meetings around the country. It's garnered about more than 2 million comments. We expect most are favorable to it based on the early information we had. And they have gone through the process. They have asked people what they thought. Most people support protecting the last natural areas in our national forests from new road building. The other thing is it makes economic sense, which is one reason the previous administration thought it was a good idea. There's a $10 billion -- that's billion with a B -- backlog on maintenance of roads, like access to campgrounds, bridges and washouts. We simply can't afford to build more roads.

>> Michael Grant:
What does roadless mean? People can't use the forest, they get in to do whatever they would like to do?

>> Rob Smith:
It keeps things pretty much the way they are. These are areas that many are fairly inaccessible now to motor vehicles. This would prevent new road building up canyons that wildlife uses, water sheds and a lot of hiking areas. These areas have a lot of trails, campgrounds. These are places that are used by people as well as wildlife. So there is a lot of public benefit for simply being there. And this rule basically says let's keep those areas where they are, especially if we are not able to keep up on maintenance with development elsewhere in the forest.

>> Michael Grant
: I know one of the concerns of the Sierra Club and others are logging that a loosening of the roadless rule would lead to logging. I have a statistic from the forest service that says only 63,000 acres of 2.8 million involved in the roadless area in Arizona and New Mexico have been deemed suitable for timbering. That doesn't exactly sound like rape, pillage and burn.

>> Rob Smith:
That's a lot. As far as logging goes, it applies more significantly to those areas in Washington and Oregon, and especially in the two national forests in Alaska where the administration is pushing through 50 timber sales in an area that had been saved through this roadless rule. What it means down here, say in the Tonto forest and other five forests in Arizona, most of those acres are open to road building, according to the same forest service. This rule says there are going to be off limits to new road building. We have on the Tonto forest, there are 4,000, more than 4,000 miles of roads of all different kinds that people can use. We're talking about not building new ones in areas that are still largely natural.

>> Michael Grant:
Mathematically, 60,000 acres out of 2.8 million doesn't sound like they're throwing the whole thing open to potential destruction, timbering.

>> Rob Smith:
There are probably fewer conflicts in Arizona, which should make it easy to do. Which is puzzling why the Bush administration is intent in overturning this rule. They are. They have tried for four years to get rid of it, even though I don't think it would displace a lot of planned activity here. There are some exceptions. There's a nice area down south, the Tumacocaris. It's a beautiful place. There is a proposal from Tucson Electric Power to build a power line through the middle of it. That would be a road not only for construction but for maintenance. It's a beautiful place now. There are alternatives where they could build elsewhere but this is the sort of threat that this would protect the area from.

>> Michael Grant:
Any specific wildlife concerns?

>> Rob Smith:
That one in particular is interesting. This is about 85,000 acres near the border. This is a part of Arizona where North America meets Central American ecologically. You get a huge variety of plant and animal species. A notable one is the Jaguar. It's native to Arizona, but it's been run off until recently when there have been some sightings in some of these areas. The Tumacacori area, which is south of Tucson near Nogales is one of the areas where there have been known to be, as well as other areas near by. It's one of the special places, one of the special creatures that needs an area that is largely undisturbed.

>> Michael Grant:
This is a Jaguar we're looking at now?

>> Rob Smith:
That is a Jaguar. A photo taken someplace. Not describing exactly where because these animals survive in remote places and we want to make sure there are some places that remain remote. Another place in Arizona is the Blue Range between Springerville and Safford, along the New Mexico border. A lot of country up there. They have reintroduced wolves several years' back. That's because it's such a large wild area and we want to keep it that way.

>> Michael Grant:
I want to touch on one other feature, the Bush administration would try to pull in more state and local oversight, input, that kind of thing, determining what should be roadless and what not. That strikes me as a positive to get more state and local input on state and local areas.

>> Rob Smith:
They have said we're not going to protect any of these areas unless the state goes through its own petition process. And rather than take the next step and say, We'll do what you want, they say, We aren't necessarily going to do what you ask for, we're simply going to make you ask again. This is after 600 meetings and a couple million comments. The state already has been involved in the process, all the states. This doesn't give them anything the state doesn't already have. That's why Governor Napolitano and other western governors said, we don't need this. These are federal lands, you have a federal obligation to protect them. Please do that, we don't need more red tape.

>> Michael Grant:
Maybe I'm missing the concept, though, but it would seem to me that if you provided more state and local input opportunity for state and local input, even if the input is being given but it's sort of being cycled through Washington, I would think it would be more meaningful input.

>> Rob Smith:
They have done it. This doesn't give them a new process they don't already have, which is why the govern said, I think for us more red tape and more hurdles and more responsibility to tell you something about the lands that are owned by all Americans. We think there have already been enough process. It's essentially paralysis by analysis, which is ironic coming from a Republican administration. But in fact they are doing everything they can, let's face it, to slow down, to bog down, overturn a rule that is broadly popular.

>> Michael Grant:
Rob Smith, appreciate the information. Happy Thanksgiving to you.

>> Rob Smith:
Thank you very much.

>> Michael Grant:
For information about "Horizon", go to our website. The address is www.az.pbs.org. Also on our site are transcripts from past "Horizon" programs, a link to contact us and information about upcoming "Horizon" topics. "Horizon" will be off tomorrow for a special program, "The Imaginators" produced in collaboration with Childplay, the award-winning local children's theatre company. And Friday, join us at 7:00 for highlights from the 2004 Walter Cronkite awards luncheon honoring longtime CBS anchor Charles Osgood. Thanks for joining us on "Horizon" this Thanksgiving eve. I'm Michael Grant. Have a great holiday. Good night.

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