March 29, 2019 • 19 mins
Jo Cameron is the woman who feels no pain. Jo is now 71 and scientists are just finding out why she has gone through her whole life experiencing very little pain. She would often cut herself or burn herself and wouldn’t notice until she saw blood or smelled burning flesh. Rachel Feltman, editor at Popular Science, joins us for what makes Jo Cameron feel no pain, a gene mutation that scientists hope could help others in the future.
Next, these measles cases are getting out of hand. The number of cases so far this year is nearing the total for all of 2018 with six states reporting outbreaks. It has become such a public health hazard that Rockland County, NY has banned unvaccinated minors from entering public spaces for 30 days. Rachel Becker, reporter at the Verge, joins us for why the measles have gotten out of control and why these types of bans may become more common.
Finally, a follow up to the lawsuit against Monsanto and its parent company Bayer. Edwin Hardeman claimed that years of using their Roundup weedkiller gave him non-Hodgkin lymphoma. A jury decided that the product did give him cancer, and they also just decided Bayer was liable in the case and owes him $80 million. Sara Randazzo, reporter for the WSJ, joins us to wrap up the case.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's Friday, March twenty nine. I'm Oscar Ramirez in Los Angeles,
and this is the Daily Dive. Joe Cameron is the
woman who Feels No Pain. Joe is now seventy one,
and scientists are just finding out why she has gone
through her whole life experiencing very little pain. She would
(00:20):
often cut herself or burn herself and wouldn't notice until
she saw blood or smelled burning flesh. Rachel Feltman, editor
at Popular Science, joins us for what makes Joe Cameron
feel no pain? A g mutation that scientists hope could
help others in the future. Next, these measles cases are
getting out of hand. The number of cases so far
this year is nearing the total for all of with
(00:43):
six states reporting outbreaks. It has become such a public
health hazard that Rockland County, New York, has banned unvaccinated
miners from entering public spaces for thirty days. Rachel Becker,
reporter at The Verge, joins us for why the measles
have gotten out of control and why the type of
bands may become more common. Finally, a follow up to
the lawsuit against Monsanto and its parent company, bear Edwin
(01:06):
Hardemann claimed that years of using their round up weed
killer gave him non Hodgkin lymphoma. A jury decided that
the product did give him cancer, and they also just
decided that Bear was liable in the case and owes
him eighty million dollars. Sarah ran Dazzo, reporter for The
Wall Street Journal, joins us to wrap up this case.
It's news without the noise. Let's dive in. There was
(01:29):
one incident she referenced that they talked about in the
case study where she was in a car accident and
she didn't feel any kind of panics the entire time.
Joining us now is Rachel Feltman, science editor at Popular
Science and hosts of the pop side podcast The Weirdest
Thing I Learned this Week. I love stories about fascinating
and weird people, and we're gonna be talking about the
(01:50):
woman that doesn't feel pain. Her name is Joe Cameron.
She's a Scottish woman and there's something very different about
how she experiences pain. For the most part, she doesn't
feel it, and scientists found out that she has this
gene mutation on a previously unidentified gene and it leads
to her really not feeling much pain at all. It
(02:12):
also leads to her to feeling very little anxiety or fear.
Researchers are a little excited to know more about this
because they feel that way down the line they might
be able to get some medications or something to help
people with their own pain treatments and anxiety treatments as well.
So tell us about Joe Cameron and what we learned
about her. What's really interesting about this case is that
(02:36):
it may surprise some people to learn that this is
not the first time scientists have studied someone who doesn't
feel pain, and in fact, we know of a few
different gene mutations that can cause this. But what's really
unusual about her is that in most cases, traditionally, when
we think about people who don't feel pain, we find
out when they're really young, because not feeling pain might
(02:59):
sound like a superpower, but it's actually really dangerous. You know.
You think about all the things you learn not to
do as a kid because they hurt. You learn you
shouldn't play with broken glass. You learn you shouldn't put
your hand on a hot so you notice when you're sick.
I got appendicitist when I was twelve, and I certainly
wouldn't have known. I My life wasn't danger if I
(03:21):
wasn't in pain. So it things like that usually become
a problem and these children either die due to elles,
were accidents, or a doctor figures out that there's something
unusual going on. So the really interesting thing about this
Scottish woman is that doctors did not find out until
she was sixty sick. And that was because she came
in with a sum that was so badly deteriorated due
(03:45):
to arthritis that she could not use it, but she
said that it felt perfectly fine, and after the surgery,
she said it felt perfectly fine even though she had
just had surgery. Understand that struck the doctors as so
unusual that they sent her for a console with a
couple of specialist teams at University College London and Oxford,
and they decided to take a look at her genome
(04:06):
and they found a mutation that, while it was on
a gene we know about, was not previously associated with
this rare lack of pain sense. When she went in
to speak to her doctors, they said, you're definitely going
to need strong pain killers after this because it can
be very brutal, and she says, I bet I won't
you know, just like really matter of fact, like I
already know that she went through her whole life this way,
(04:28):
getting cuts, burns. She said that it often took the
smell of burning flesh or her husband to say, hey,
you're on fire. You're burning yourself before she would really
realize it. And the one that I loved to here
is that she would each Scotch bonnet chili peppers and
say that she only had a pleasant glow after. So
if you think of habanaro peppers, these Scotch bonnet ones
are at least twice as hot as those some four
(04:50):
hundred and fifty thousand on the Skullville unit level. This
is kind of the life she was living, and she
didn't really think much of it. The other thing that
this gene mutation loud her was they say that she
lived a life mostly free of anxiety and fear also,
which is another thing that researchers really want to look into.
She took an anxiety disorder questionnaire. She scored zero out
(05:12):
of twenty one, and she said she can never remember
feeling depressed or scared or anything in her life. There
was one incident she referenced that they talked about in
the case study where she was in a car accident
and she didn't feel any kind of panics the entire
time she flipped upside down in that car when she
had that accident, and yes, she didn't feel any anxiety.
What's really fascinating to me is that it really makes
(05:36):
you wonder how many people assume they just have a
high pain tolerance and they actually have extremely ab normal
perception of pain, especially since, at least according to her anecdotes,
it sounds like her father probably had the same mutation.
Her son has like a partial he inherited it from
his mom but on his dad, so he has like
(05:57):
some of this sensitivity, but it sounds like her father
had it completely, and so you know, you have to
imagine that because her father had also always been this way,
that added to the allusion that this is normal. They
said that there are a few downsides to this, only
in the fact that she is quite forgetful, she's prone
to losing a lot of things or losing her train
(06:18):
of thought mid sentence, and the others that she's never
felt that kind of adrenaline rush that a lot of
people talk about, and that probably figures into her low
anxiety and lack of fear. Also briefly described to us
how this works, how this gene mutation actually results in
her feeling less pain. There are several different gene mutations
that have been associated with lack of pain. In Jane's case,
(06:38):
it is what we call a studio gene. So it's
basically where you have a regular gene like everyone else has,
but then you have another partial copy of it somewhere
in your d n A. Now, in most cases these
won't do anything. They're partial genes. They're going to end
up being junk DNA. We have a lot of that,
But sometimes they do do something, often at least slightly
(06:58):
related to what the gene does. In her case, they
knew that the original gene, the pseudo gene, was a
partial copy of It creates an enzyme that breaks down
something called anantibide, and that's a can of annoyed natural
in the human body, and it promotes euphoria and decreases
that sensation, sadness, pain, lots of things like that. Some
(07:20):
researchers think that it might be part of that rush
of good feeling you have when you exercise that kind
of dulls pain if you think about it, and sure enough,
she had seventy more of this then is typical, so
she's kind of always having that like hi you have
when you push yourself really hard to work out and
you're like pushing a little bit harder. They've tried to
(07:42):
harness this specific gene before in combating depression and anxiety
and haven't been successful, and they're not really sure why.
So there's a lot of hope that studying how exactly
this works in her can help. We have seen some
downsides in these rodent subjects where they have with memory,
and sure enough, the woman in the case report says
(08:03):
that she does have trouble remembering things. I think she
even said sometimes she forgets a word she's trying to
recall mid sentence, so obviously that is not awesome. But
she also seems to have a slightly tire rate of
healing than average, which is also something that has been
seen in the mouse subjects. So it's all really cool
and it provides a lot of opportunities for researchers to
(08:25):
learn more and potentially help people. And for the next
few years, I'm assuming that she's going to be working
with researchers so they can find out as much as
they can about her in these specific gene mutations. Rachel Feltman,
science editor at Popular Science, hosts of the pop Side
podcast The Weirdest Thing I Learned this week, Thank you
very much for joining us. Thanks for having me. Vaccine
(08:53):
refusal is one of the growing public health threats of
our time. If we continue to allow non medical exemptions
to vaccination, the rates vaccine will continue to fall, more
outbreaks will undoubtedly fall. Joining us now is Rachel Becker,
science reporter at The Verge. These measle outbreaks are getting
out of control right now. The number of cases of
measles this year in the US is nearing the total
(09:14):
for all of There's a bunch of states that are
reporting outbreaks. Outbreaks are defined US three or more cases,
so we have some going on to New York State,
New York City, Washington, Texas, Illinois, California. These are fluctuating
constantly because you know, you add a kid or two
here and there every day. Three d fourteen cases nationwide
as of March twenty one. That's getting close to the
(09:36):
three hundred seventy two for all of last year, and
a new York County specifically banned unvaccinated children from public
spaces for thirty days. This is in Rockland County, New York.
Tell us a little bit about this band, and then
we'll get into a larger discussion about measles. Rockland County
has been dealing with measles outbreak for the past six months.
They've got a hundred and fifty three people who have
(09:58):
been infected so far that are confirmed and and that's
still going up. And so the public health officials have
been investigating, you know, trying to find people who may
have been exposed, and they've been kind of running into
barriers and so, yes, a few days ago, Rockland County
executive announced that underage kids who are unvaccinated are going
(10:20):
to be banned from public places. And the way it's
going to work, it's it's not going to like require
hand over their vaccination records to get into the mall.
You know, they're not they're not doing that. That would
be so difficult to do to stop every parent. So
that was one of my big curiosities. How do you
enforce something like this, and even the way they're enforcing
it also it was kind of crazy too, but please
go on to explain they're not going to ask people
(10:43):
for their vaccination records to go into public spaces like
the movie theater, right, So instead the plan is to
do a retroactive enforcement. So the ideas that as the
outbreak continues, if through epidemiological investigations they find someone who
was unvaccinated, who was a minor in a public space
(11:03):
who was like to the outbreak, then the parents could
wind up getting in trouble and could face a fine
or even jail time, And the county says that's not
what they want to do. The county says that this
is really to raise awareness and get attention from parents
that they need the parents to cooperate and they need
the parents to vaccinate their children in order to protect everybody. Yeah,
(11:24):
that fine is five dollars or possibility of ninety days
in jail, but as you said, they don't want to
put anybody in jail over this. From the officials, they
said that as this outbreak has continued, our inspectors have
begun to meet increasing resistance from those they're trying to protect.
What kind of resistance are they getting, I guess they
pointed to somebody who exposed people at a target and
(11:44):
later stopped helping investigators. Something that's really key as public
health officials try to contain an outbreak is they need
to know where people who are infected were and when,
so that they can tell people who might have been exposed,
so that the people who have been exposed can monitor themselves.
If they themselves haven't been vaccinated, they can go see
their healthcare provider. They need people who have been infected
(12:08):
to tell them where they've been and when, and so
in this particular case, it sounded like investigators talked to
this person. This person was helping them originally and then
stopped helping, so they weren't able to really narrow down
the window of time that people might have been exposed
at this target, and so then you've got a lot
of fear of people who might have been exposed because
they just don't know. I wanted to ask the broader
(12:29):
question because the Measles Moms and Rebella vaccine, the MMR vaccine,
has been proven to be very effective, but still people
are not getting them. What is the reason behind that.
I know that there's a lot of loopholes in different
states where kids can be exempt from getting it. First off,
you know, the measles moms and REBELLA vaccine is very safe,
it's very effective, and it's very important that everybody get
(12:51):
vaccinated who can get vaccinated, because people who are too
young to be vaccinated or too sick to be vaccinated
or to out an effective immune response, really depend on
her immunity to protect them. And her immunity is where
everybody is protected against the virus so that it can't
spread to the people who are not. And so that's
(13:12):
why states have vaccination requirements for kids who are entering school.
That's why people are supposed to get their shots before
they start congregating, you know, in classes. The hiccup is
that in several states, parents can get exemptions for religious reasons,
for medical reasons if, for example, a kid is too
sick to get vaccines, and also in some states for
(13:35):
philosophical reasons, so if they just don't believe in vaccines.
Seventeen states that allow parents to skip them just based
off of their personal beliefs, and so that really erose
the herd immunity that certain children depend on to be
protected from the measles. And measles isn't a benign disease,
you know, people like to dismiss it as just a
fever in a rash, but in fact it can cause pneumonia,
(13:57):
it can cause brain swelling, that event leads to brain damage,
and it can kill. Officials are saying that this these
types of bands banning kids from public spaces could happen
increasingly in the near terms, just based off of how
quickly these things are spreading. Rachel Becker, Science reporter at
The Verge, Thank you very much for joining us. Thank
you today. History was made today. The jury unanimously held
(14:30):
mont Santo responsible for causing this man's cancer. Joining us
now is Sarah ran Dazzle, Legal reporter for The Wall
Street Journal. We wanted to bring you back. We wanted
to talk about this follow up to this case that
Monsanto and Bear we're going through with Edwin Hardeman. He
claimed that he developed non Hodgkin lymphoma after using their
roundup weed killer for over the course of many, many years.
(14:54):
He said that he got ill because of it. The trial,
this one was unique in that it went through two phases.
The for phase was the jury decided that using the
roundup weed killer was significant in him getting cancer, and
then the second phase was to determine the liability of
Monsanto and Bear in this whole process, and we came
out with an award amount for Edwin. They're going to
(15:16):
be paying him eighty million dollars over this. So what
do we know about this latest development. It was a
pretty big deal for the plantiff. Yesterday the jury came
back completely in his favor and they basically said yes
to every question they were asked, which included whether they
thought roundups design was defective, whether they thought it should
have had a warning, and that mon Santo failed to warn,
and that they were negligent by not failing to warn.
(15:36):
So they said yes to all those questions, and then
they awarded him eighty point three million dollars in damages.
And part of this was in determining their liability was
did you do enough to test this product? Did you
go through this? And even some of the lawyers are saying,
these people that were working there at Monsanto and Bear
and specifically on this product, you know, there's wasn't this
grand conspiracy to say we're going to give people cancer
(15:58):
every day when they were leaving works. That was one
of the arguments that they had about this. But the
law the in two cases. Now, this is the second
case where they've determined that this roundup did cause cancer
in the two plaintiffs. The second phase of the trial
looked at the company's conduct, and the plaintiffs narrative is
that they didn't want to do science on it because
they didn't want to find it was dangerous by or
(16:19):
counters that they did plenty of science that proved it
was safe, but it's a real back and forth between
whether they did the science and as they did the
right kind of science and what they wanted to find.
In the end, Bear after this they said that they
stand by their product and that the verdict really is
not going to have an effect on future trials. There's
over eleven thousand lawsuits that are in the pipeline right now.
(16:40):
I think there's going to be four or five maybe
that come later this year. Even I mean, I would
have to imagine that these findings by these juries are
going to impact that at least. Yes, so they impacted
in the broader sense. I think at mont Santo and
Bear were trying to say that it's not precedent sending
in the term, in the sense of the jurors in
the next case aren't told okay, in the last one
(17:01):
they did eight million. You know, what do you say?
And so each trial has independent jurors, and so in
that way, they're each individual, but cumulatively it makes a
big deal. If you start to rack up losses, obviously
that's going to have a huge impact on how it
could get ultimately resolved. How has the market reacted to
all of this news today? It was less of a
shift than last week. Last week, I believe it fell
(17:23):
or so maybe nine percent on the On the news
today the stock one up and down a little bit,
but ended up about the same. So I think maybe
investors are finally getting a little more comfortable, or maybe
this was just very expected since the first part of
the trial found it did cause his cancer, so it
seemed very very likely that the jury was going to
award some damages yesterday. You know. Part of why this
(17:44):
is so interesting is that round up lead killer is
such a common product. A lot of people use it,
and we're already seeing effects based off of what the
last lawsuit and and this one have determined. L a
county in California has banned the use of round up
lead killer. They're asking all of their departments in l
A County to stop using this product and explore alternative
(18:04):
methods for vegetation management. The big question is where do
we go from here? Does Monsanto's round up cause cancer?
From these trials, they say yes, the science says maybe,
it's kind of all over the place. How difficult would
it be for Bear to just come up with another formulas,
something that doesn't use this glypha state that is at
the center of this It would be a pretty large
(18:26):
scale shift for them. Glyphosate the active ingredient, and roundup
really underpins a large chunk of their products. They've developed
seeds that are glyphis state resistant. They have a several
different round of products that are all glypha state based.
So to shift at this point would be really a
complete pivot. So in the meantime, they're definitely going to
continue to use glyphos state products and and double down
on them and keep them on the shelves because it's
(18:48):
really such a large part of their business. Wow, I
did not know that. I mean, everything is kind of
if they change the one product, then yeah, they have
to go back and change the formula for so many
other things. They're all kind of co dependent on each other. Exactly. Yeah, wow,
that's amazing. For now, the jury has awarded eighty point
three million dollars to Edwin Harderman for getting a non
Hodgkin lymphoma for his use of roundup weed killer. Sarah
(19:10):
run Dazzo, legal reporter for The Wall Street Journal, thank
you very much for joining us. Thanks so much, and
keep an eye out because the next trial actually started today,
so we'll have another verdictxan. Okay, thank you. That's it
for this week. Join us on social media at Daily
Dive Pod on Twitter and Daily Dive Podcast on Facebook.
(19:33):
Leave us a comment, give us a rating, and tell
us the stories that you're interested in. Follow us on
I Heard Radio, or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
The Daily Dive is produced by Miranda Morndo and engineered
by Tony Sarantino. I'm Oscar Ramirez. This was her Daily
Dive
It's Friday, March twenty nine. I'm Oscar Ramirez in Los Angeles,
and this is the Daily Dive. Joe Cameron is the
woman who Feels No Pain. Joe is now seventy one,
and scientists are just finding out why she has gone
through her whole life experiencing very little pain. She would
(00:20):
often cut herself or burn herself and wouldn't notice until
she saw blood or smelled burning flesh. Rachel Feltman, editor
at Popular Science, joins us for what makes Joe Cameron
feel no pain? A g mutation that scientists hope could
help others in the future. Next, these measles cases are
getting out of hand. The number of cases so far
this year is nearing the total for all of with
(00:43):
six states reporting outbreaks. It has become such a public
health hazard that Rockland County, New York, has banned unvaccinated
miners from entering public spaces for thirty days. Rachel Becker,
reporter at The Verge, joins us for why the measles
have gotten out of control and why the type of
bands may become more common. Finally, a follow up to
the lawsuit against Monsanto and its parent company, bear Edwin
(01:06):
Hardemann claimed that years of using their round up weed
killer gave him non Hodgkin lymphoma. A jury decided that
the product did give him cancer, and they also just
decided that Bear was liable in the case and owes
him eighty million dollars. Sarah ran Dazzo, reporter for The
Wall Street Journal, joins us to wrap up this case.
It's news without the noise. Let's dive in. There was
(01:29):
one incident she referenced that they talked about in the
case study where she was in a car accident and
she didn't feel any kind of panics the entire time.
Joining us now is Rachel Feltman, science editor at Popular
Science and hosts of the pop side podcast The Weirdest
Thing I Learned this Week. I love stories about fascinating
and weird people, and we're gonna be talking about the
(01:50):
woman that doesn't feel pain. Her name is Joe Cameron.
She's a Scottish woman and there's something very different about
how she experiences pain. For the most part, she doesn't
feel it, and scientists found out that she has this
gene mutation on a previously unidentified gene and it leads
to her really not feeling much pain at all. It
(02:12):
also leads to her to feeling very little anxiety or fear.
Researchers are a little excited to know more about this
because they feel that way down the line they might
be able to get some medications or something to help
people with their own pain treatments and anxiety treatments as well.
So tell us about Joe Cameron and what we learned
about her. What's really interesting about this case is that
(02:36):
it may surprise some people to learn that this is
not the first time scientists have studied someone who doesn't
feel pain, and in fact, we know of a few
different gene mutations that can cause this. But what's really
unusual about her is that in most cases, traditionally, when
we think about people who don't feel pain, we find
out when they're really young, because not feeling pain might
(02:59):
sound like a superpower, but it's actually really dangerous. You know.
You think about all the things you learn not to
do as a kid because they hurt. You learn you
shouldn't play with broken glass. You learn you shouldn't put
your hand on a hot so you notice when you're sick.
I got appendicitist when I was twelve, and I certainly
wouldn't have known. I My life wasn't danger if I
(03:21):
wasn't in pain. So it things like that usually become
a problem and these children either die due to elles,
were accidents, or a doctor figures out that there's something
unusual going on. So the really interesting thing about this
Scottish woman is that doctors did not find out until
she was sixty sick. And that was because she came
in with a sum that was so badly deteriorated due
(03:45):
to arthritis that she could not use it, but she
said that it felt perfectly fine, and after the surgery,
she said it felt perfectly fine even though she had
just had surgery. Understand that struck the doctors as so
unusual that they sent her for a console with a
couple of specialist teams at University College London and Oxford,
and they decided to take a look at her genome
(04:06):
and they found a mutation that, while it was on
a gene we know about, was not previously associated with
this rare lack of pain sense. When she went in
to speak to her doctors, they said, you're definitely going
to need strong pain killers after this because it can
be very brutal, and she says, I bet I won't
you know, just like really matter of fact, like I
already know that she went through her whole life this way,
(04:28):
getting cuts, burns. She said that it often took the
smell of burning flesh or her husband to say, hey,
you're on fire. You're burning yourself before she would really
realize it. And the one that I loved to here
is that she would each Scotch bonnet chili peppers and
say that she only had a pleasant glow after. So
if you think of habanaro peppers, these Scotch bonnet ones
are at least twice as hot as those some four
(04:50):
hundred and fifty thousand on the Skullville unit level. This
is kind of the life she was living, and she
didn't really think much of it. The other thing that
this gene mutation loud her was they say that she
lived a life mostly free of anxiety and fear also,
which is another thing that researchers really want to look into.
She took an anxiety disorder questionnaire. She scored zero out
(05:12):
of twenty one, and she said she can never remember
feeling depressed or scared or anything in her life. There
was one incident she referenced that they talked about in
the case study where she was in a car accident
and she didn't feel any kind of panics the entire
time she flipped upside down in that car when she
had that accident, and yes, she didn't feel any anxiety.
What's really fascinating to me is that it really makes
(05:36):
you wonder how many people assume they just have a
high pain tolerance and they actually have extremely ab normal
perception of pain, especially since, at least according to her anecdotes,
it sounds like her father probably had the same mutation.
Her son has like a partial he inherited it from
his mom but on his dad, so he has like
(05:57):
some of this sensitivity, but it sounds like her father
had it completely, and so you know, you have to
imagine that because her father had also always been this way,
that added to the allusion that this is normal. They
said that there are a few downsides to this, only
in the fact that she is quite forgetful, she's prone
to losing a lot of things or losing her train
(06:18):
of thought mid sentence, and the others that she's never
felt that kind of adrenaline rush that a lot of
people talk about, and that probably figures into her low
anxiety and lack of fear. Also briefly described to us
how this works, how this gene mutation actually results in
her feeling less pain. There are several different gene mutations
that have been associated with lack of pain. In Jane's case,
(06:38):
it is what we call a studio gene. So it's
basically where you have a regular gene like everyone else has,
but then you have another partial copy of it somewhere
in your d n A. Now, in most cases these
won't do anything. They're partial genes. They're going to end
up being junk DNA. We have a lot of that,
But sometimes they do do something, often at least slightly
(06:58):
related to what the gene does. In her case, they
knew that the original gene, the pseudo gene, was a
partial copy of It creates an enzyme that breaks down
something called anantibide, and that's a can of annoyed natural
in the human body, and it promotes euphoria and decreases
that sensation, sadness, pain, lots of things like that. Some
(07:20):
researchers think that it might be part of that rush
of good feeling you have when you exercise that kind
of dulls pain if you think about it, and sure enough,
she had seventy more of this then is typical, so
she's kind of always having that like hi you have
when you push yourself really hard to work out and
you're like pushing a little bit harder. They've tried to
(07:42):
harness this specific gene before in combating depression and anxiety
and haven't been successful, and they're not really sure why.
So there's a lot of hope that studying how exactly
this works in her can help. We have seen some
downsides in these rodent subjects where they have with memory,
and sure enough, the woman in the case report says
(08:03):
that she does have trouble remembering things. I think she
even said sometimes she forgets a word she's trying to
recall mid sentence, so obviously that is not awesome. But
she also seems to have a slightly tire rate of
healing than average, which is also something that has been
seen in the mouse subjects. So it's all really cool
and it provides a lot of opportunities for researchers to
(08:25):
learn more and potentially help people. And for the next
few years, I'm assuming that she's going to be working
with researchers so they can find out as much as
they can about her in these specific gene mutations. Rachel Feltman,
science editor at Popular Science, hosts of the pop Side
podcast The Weirdest Thing I Learned this week, Thank you
very much for joining us. Thanks for having me. Vaccine
(08:53):
refusal is one of the growing public health threats of
our time. If we continue to allow non medical exemptions
to vaccination, the rates vaccine will continue to fall, more
outbreaks will undoubtedly fall. Joining us now is Rachel Becker,
science reporter at The Verge. These measle outbreaks are getting
out of control right now. The number of cases of
measles this year in the US is nearing the total
(09:14):
for all of There's a bunch of states that are
reporting outbreaks. Outbreaks are defined US three or more cases,
so we have some going on to New York State,
New York City, Washington, Texas, Illinois, California. These are fluctuating
constantly because you know, you add a kid or two
here and there every day. Three d fourteen cases nationwide
as of March twenty one. That's getting close to the
(09:36):
three hundred seventy two for all of last year, and
a new York County specifically banned unvaccinated children from public
spaces for thirty days. This is in Rockland County, New York.
Tell us a little bit about this band, and then
we'll get into a larger discussion about measles. Rockland County
has been dealing with measles outbreak for the past six months.
They've got a hundred and fifty three people who have
(09:58):
been infected so far that are confirmed and and that's
still going up. And so the public health officials have
been investigating, you know, trying to find people who may
have been exposed, and they've been kind of running into
barriers and so, yes, a few days ago, Rockland County
executive announced that underage kids who are unvaccinated are going
(10:20):
to be banned from public places. And the way it's
going to work, it's it's not going to like require
hand over their vaccination records to get into the mall.
You know, they're not they're not doing that. That would
be so difficult to do to stop every parent. So
that was one of my big curiosities. How do you
enforce something like this, and even the way they're enforcing
it also it was kind of crazy too, but please
go on to explain they're not going to ask people
(10:43):
for their vaccination records to go into public spaces like
the movie theater, right, So instead the plan is to
do a retroactive enforcement. So the ideas that as the
outbreak continues, if through epidemiological investigations they find someone who
was unvaccinated, who was a minor in a public space
(11:03):
who was like to the outbreak, then the parents could
wind up getting in trouble and could face a fine
or even jail time, And the county says that's not
what they want to do. The county says that this
is really to raise awareness and get attention from parents
that they need the parents to cooperate and they need
the parents to vaccinate their children in order to protect everybody. Yeah,
(11:24):
that fine is five dollars or possibility of ninety days
in jail, but as you said, they don't want to
put anybody in jail over this. From the officials, they
said that as this outbreak has continued, our inspectors have
begun to meet increasing resistance from those they're trying to protect.
What kind of resistance are they getting, I guess they
pointed to somebody who exposed people at a target and
(11:44):
later stopped helping investigators. Something that's really key as public
health officials try to contain an outbreak is they need
to know where people who are infected were and when,
so that they can tell people who might have been exposed,
so that the people who have been exposed can monitor themselves.
If they themselves haven't been vaccinated, they can go see
their healthcare provider. They need people who have been infected
(12:08):
to tell them where they've been and when, and so
in this particular case, it sounded like investigators talked to
this person. This person was helping them originally and then
stopped helping, so they weren't able to really narrow down
the window of time that people might have been exposed
at this target, and so then you've got a lot
of fear of people who might have been exposed because
they just don't know. I wanted to ask the broader
(12:29):
question because the Measles Moms and Rebella vaccine, the MMR vaccine,
has been proven to be very effective, but still people
are not getting them. What is the reason behind that.
I know that there's a lot of loopholes in different
states where kids can be exempt from getting it. First off,
you know, the measles moms and REBELLA vaccine is very safe,
it's very effective, and it's very important that everybody get
(12:51):
vaccinated who can get vaccinated, because people who are too
young to be vaccinated or too sick to be vaccinated
or to out an effective immune response, really depend on
her immunity to protect them. And her immunity is where
everybody is protected against the virus so that it can't
spread to the people who are not. And so that's
(13:12):
why states have vaccination requirements for kids who are entering school.
That's why people are supposed to get their shots before
they start congregating, you know, in classes. The hiccup is
that in several states, parents can get exemptions for religious reasons,
for medical reasons if, for example, a kid is too
sick to get vaccines, and also in some states for
(13:35):
philosophical reasons, so if they just don't believe in vaccines.
Seventeen states that allow parents to skip them just based
off of their personal beliefs, and so that really erose
the herd immunity that certain children depend on to be
protected from the measles. And measles isn't a benign disease,
you know, people like to dismiss it as just a
fever in a rash, but in fact it can cause pneumonia,
(13:57):
it can cause brain swelling, that event leads to brain damage,
and it can kill. Officials are saying that this these
types of bands banning kids from public spaces could happen
increasingly in the near terms, just based off of how
quickly these things are spreading. Rachel Becker, Science reporter at
The Verge, Thank you very much for joining us. Thank
you today. History was made today. The jury unanimously held
(14:30):
mont Santo responsible for causing this man's cancer. Joining us
now is Sarah ran Dazzle, Legal reporter for The Wall
Street Journal. We wanted to bring you back. We wanted
to talk about this follow up to this case that
Monsanto and Bear we're going through with Edwin Hardeman. He
claimed that he developed non Hodgkin lymphoma after using their
roundup weed killer for over the course of many, many years.
(14:54):
He said that he got ill because of it. The trial,
this one was unique in that it went through two phases.
The for phase was the jury decided that using the
roundup weed killer was significant in him getting cancer, and
then the second phase was to determine the liability of
Monsanto and Bear in this whole process, and we came
out with an award amount for Edwin. They're going to
(15:16):
be paying him eighty million dollars over this. So what
do we know about this latest development. It was a
pretty big deal for the plantiff. Yesterday the jury came
back completely in his favor and they basically said yes
to every question they were asked, which included whether they
thought roundups design was defective, whether they thought it should
have had a warning, and that mon Santo failed to warn,
and that they were negligent by not failing to warn.
(15:36):
So they said yes to all those questions, and then
they awarded him eighty point three million dollars in damages.
And part of this was in determining their liability was
did you do enough to test this product? Did you
go through this? And even some of the lawyers are saying,
these people that were working there at Monsanto and Bear
and specifically on this product, you know, there's wasn't this
grand conspiracy to say we're going to give people cancer
(15:58):
every day when they were leaving works. That was one
of the arguments that they had about this. But the
law the in two cases. Now, this is the second
case where they've determined that this roundup did cause cancer
in the two plaintiffs. The second phase of the trial
looked at the company's conduct, and the plaintiffs narrative is
that they didn't want to do science on it because
they didn't want to find it was dangerous by or
(16:19):
counters that they did plenty of science that proved it
was safe, but it's a real back and forth between
whether they did the science and as they did the
right kind of science and what they wanted to find.
In the end, Bear after this they said that they
stand by their product and that the verdict really is
not going to have an effect on future trials. There's
over eleven thousand lawsuits that are in the pipeline right now.
(16:40):
I think there's going to be four or five maybe
that come later this year. Even I mean, I would
have to imagine that these findings by these juries are
going to impact that at least. Yes, so they impacted
in the broader sense. I think at mont Santo and
Bear were trying to say that it's not precedent sending
in the term, in the sense of the jurors in
the next case aren't told okay, in the last one
(17:01):
they did eight million. You know, what do you say?
And so each trial has independent jurors, and so in
that way, they're each individual, but cumulatively it makes a
big deal. If you start to rack up losses, obviously
that's going to have a huge impact on how it
could get ultimately resolved. How has the market reacted to
all of this news today? It was less of a
shift than last week. Last week, I believe it fell
(17:23):
or so maybe nine percent on the On the news
today the stock one up and down a little bit,
but ended up about the same. So I think maybe
investors are finally getting a little more comfortable, or maybe
this was just very expected since the first part of
the trial found it did cause his cancer, so it
seemed very very likely that the jury was going to
award some damages yesterday. You know. Part of why this
(17:44):
is so interesting is that round up lead killer is
such a common product. A lot of people use it,
and we're already seeing effects based off of what the
last lawsuit and and this one have determined. L a
county in California has banned the use of round up
lead killer. They're asking all of their departments in l
A County to stop using this product and explore alternative
(18:04):
methods for vegetation management. The big question is where do
we go from here? Does Monsanto's round up cause cancer?
From these trials, they say yes, the science says maybe,
it's kind of all over the place. How difficult would
it be for Bear to just come up with another formulas,
something that doesn't use this glypha state that is at
the center of this It would be a pretty large
(18:26):
scale shift for them. Glyphosate the active ingredient, and roundup
really underpins a large chunk of their products. They've developed
seeds that are glyphis state resistant. They have a several
different round of products that are all glypha state based.
So to shift at this point would be really a
complete pivot. So in the meantime, they're definitely going to
continue to use glyphos state products and and double down
on them and keep them on the shelves because it's
(18:48):
really such a large part of their business. Wow, I
did not know that. I mean, everything is kind of
if they change the one product, then yeah, they have
to go back and change the formula for so many
other things. They're all kind of co dependent on each other. Exactly. Yeah, wow,
that's amazing. For now, the jury has awarded eighty point
three million dollars to Edwin Harderman for getting a non
Hodgkin lymphoma for his use of roundup weed killer. Sarah
(19:10):
run Dazzo, legal reporter for The Wall Street Journal, thank
you very much for joining us. Thanks so much, and
keep an eye out because the next trial actually started today,
so we'll have another verdictxan. Okay, thank you. That's it
for this week. Join us on social media at Daily
Dive Pod on Twitter and Daily Dive Podcast on Facebook.
(19:33):
Leave us a comment, give us a rating, and tell
us the stories that you're interested in. Follow us on
I Heard Radio, or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
The Daily Dive is produced by Miranda Morndo and engineered
by Tony Sarantino. I'm Oscar Ramirez. This was her Daily
Dive
The Daily Dive News
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.