March 25, 2023 - PBS News Weekend full episode

JOHN YANG: Tonight on "PBS News Weekend," a massive deadly tornado overnight leaves devastation in its wake in rural Mississippi.

Then a new Pentagon study reveals U.S. Military airmen and ground crews have a higher risk of cancer.

TARA COPP: For these military families, they're running out of time.

Finding out the why will be important to protect the next generation of pilots.

But what they need right now is help for the current generation.

JOHN YANG: And the barriers stopping people from going to the doctor for basic care and screenings.

(BREAK) JOHN YANG: Good evening.

I'm John Yang.

Spring, the season of rebirth and renewal has reminded us that it can also be the season of death and destruction.

At least 25 people are dead and dozens more injured after a tornado ripped through a rural Mississippi Friday night over an hour northwest of Jackson.

This afternoon, Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves declared a state of emergency as officials continue to comb through the damage.

Homes leveled, power lines downed, neighborhoods destroyed.

This is the scene thousands of Mississippi residents woke up to this morning.

EDGAR O'NEAL: Complete and utter devastation.

Just houses, roofs ripped off of houses, walls tucked down from houses, trees up.

NO NAME GIVEN: Hey, you all need help over there?

JOHN YANG: The storm pummeled this stretch of the Mississippi Delta with wind gust up to 80 miles per hour, and hail the size of golf balls.

NO NAME GIVEN: We ran, got in the bathroom, in the tub with my wife, and off through pillows over us, and we could hear stuff hitting the roof.

JOHN YANG: The tornado was so intense that radar images left the meteorologist for WTVA in Tupelo nearly speechless.

NO NAME GIVEN: Oh, man.

Dear Jesus, please help them.

JOHN YANG: Early this morning, Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves dispatched search and rescue teams to sift through the rubble for survivors.

Damage from the storm stretches over 100 miles across the state with debris and wreckage blocking roads.

NO NAME GIVEN: Everybody is helping everybody.

Not in just this part of town.

It's everywhere.

Everybody is being, helping, and praying, (inaudible) everybody.

JOHN YANG: The National Weather Service says that on Sunday there's a chance of severe thunderstorms capable of producing more tornadoes across the Southeast.

As other states brace for impact, Mississippi hopes to find more survivors.

Russian President Vladimir Putin says he will move tactical nuclear weapons into Belarus.

The former Soviet Republic had deactivated its nukes and sent them to Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Putin, speaking on state television today, said nuclear storage facilities would be finished by July.

Belarus has been a staging ground for Russian troops in its invasion of Ukraine.

And Gordon Moore, the cofounder of Intel, has died.

He was known as one of the fathers of Silicon Valley and for Moore's law.

His 1960s prediction that computing power would roughly double every two years for the foreseeable future, making computers smaller, faster, and cheaper.

It's held true for decades and is a driving force of technological and social change and economic growth.

Moore was 94 years old.

Still to come on "PBS News Weekend," what's stopping people from going to see the doctor?

And how fossil finders can come in all shapes, sizes, and even ages.

(BREAK) JOHN YANG: The women and men of the U.S. military already have some of the most dangerous jobs in the world putting themselves in harm's way.

A new Pentagon study reveals that the military has a higher risk of another danger, cancer.

Ali Rogin has more.

ALI ROGIN: The unprecedented study was commissioned by Congress in 2021.

It followed nearly 1 million service members who flew on or worked on military aircraft between 1992 and 2017.

It found that military pilots and the ground crews who helped them were at greater risk of developing cancer of any kind compared to the general U.S. population.

Air crews suffered an 87% higher rate of melanoma.

Men were 16% likelier to get prostate cancer, and women were 16% more likely to get breast cancer.

Ground crews had a 19% higher rate of cancers of the brain and nervous system, a 15% higher rate of thyroid cancer, and a 9% higher likelihood of kidney or renal cancers.

Joining me here to discuss is Tara Copp, Pentagon and National Security Reporter for the Associated Press.

Tara, thank you so much for being here.

You've been speaking over the years to families and to service members who have long been calling for this study.

What are they telling you now that it's out?

TARA COPP, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS: They were blown away.

There's a sense of relief.

There's a sense of frustration as to why this took so long.

There are pilots who've been going to their doctors four years saying, I flew.

There's got to be something there, there.

Or they weren't detected in time to save their lives.

When this study finally came out, it's like this first tool now that these pilots and these ground crews can take, and say, let's check.

ALI ROGIN: And you have gotten to know a lot of them very well, including one in particular.

His name is Boot Hill, the late Boot Hill, and he really spearheaded this study.

Tell me about him?

TARA COPP: So Commander Thomas "Boot" Hill means a lot to me.

He was kind of the heart of this fighter pilots can be very closed.

They tend to be very private.

I haven't met many that just love talking to the press.

So, it took us like six months probably to warm up to each other on the phone and in emails to where I really got to hear his story.

Once he was diagnosed, once he started to see his friends dying, he literally created an Excel spreadsheet, name by name of Tomcat pilots.

The same F-14 that was so popular in Top Gun and just looking at all the names and all the commanding officers who had been diagnosed and then started to reach out to other airframes.

And by the time he passed, he had created a list of everybody from 1985 to 2001 who had been diagnosed with cancer.

ALI ROGIN: And this study didn't actually look at the causes of these increased risk of cancer.

But certainly the people who have been affected by it have their own theories, well founded theories.

What have you learned about that?

TARA COPP: So, cause is always the hardest thing.

You know, you have a lifetime of exposures.

Maybe you have a genetic proclivity to cancer, or maybe you smoked, or maybe you drank, or maybe you were exposed to something in the environment that lead to cancer.

But with pilots in particular, there seems to be something that they are getting exposed to.

You see a lot of melanoma and a lot of the studies already done say, OK, well, they are flying and they're getting exposed to more radiation that way.

But what about the brain cancers?

What about the thyroid cancer?

And so there are other things in the cockpit, whether it's radiation from the radars or the power sources to those radars, or whether it's possibly the jet fuel or fumes or when they have to clean parts, they have to use very toxic solvents.

And so there just needs to be more work done to see, you know, what may behind this.

ALI ROGIN: And in fact, there is going to be more work done the next step, Congress has to conduct a larger study looking at the causes.

Why did this have to be done in two phases like this?

TARA COPP: That was kind of the same question I was asking, you know, when I saw the way it was constructed, I think it was to get buy in.

Every single time with a piece of legislation, you'll often see a study required first.

That's usually because it's a lot easier for members to buy in on a study than it is to immediately buy in on a, we need to fix this because these guys are suffering.

They have their study now.

They know the rates are higher.

And this next study is going to be exhaustive.

You know, do you do just the cockpit?

Do you do an entire aircraft carrier that has its own massive radars, that has jet fuel, that moves through the air and water systems?

So that's really going to be a challenge for Congress.

How expensive do you want this to be?

How long do you want it to take?

And for these military families, they're running out of time.

Finding out the why will be important to protect the next generation of pilots.

But what they need right now is help for the current generation.

ALI ROGIN: One thing I found interesting is that the study found that even though the rates of cancer were higher, the survival rates were also higher.

Why is that?

TARA COPP: They're generally in better shape.

And they also have to go to required medical checkups.

So they were getting screened regularly and more and earlier.

One of the things that the Pentagon actually has to do now is has to go pull from VA data and from state cancer registries.

Because there are a lot of people that once they leave the military, they don't keep going to the VA for health care or because they didn't retire as an officer 20 years in service.

They're not getting the military's health care system.

So they weren't captured in this.

And the Pentagon even said in its study, once we have this bigger, you know, universe of people, these numbers may be even worse.

ALI ROGIN: Wow.

Stunning to think about.

Tara Copp with the Associated Press, thank you so much for your time.

TARA COPP: Thank you for having me.

JOHN YANG: Preventative medical care can be a key tool in controlling high healthcare costs.

It can detect and treat early warning signs, help avoid costly emergency room visits, and contribute to better outcomes.

But nearly a third of Americans lack access to primary care services such as routine doctors checkups.

And 40% of U.S. adults say the financial burden of care has led them to delay going to the doctor or just not go at all.

We ask people around the country to tell us about the barriers they encounter when they try to go to the doctor for preventative care and primary care services.

ASHLEY GIL DE LAMADRID: I haven't been to a primary care doctor in maybe two or three years.

JOSEPH BAGDOVITZ: I just went to the doctor for a routine checkup with some blood tests, and I get this big bill in the mail a few weeks later.

And that experience by itself makes me less likely to go to the doctor because there's just so much uncertainty.

TOM BORROMEO: At first I was looking at Yelp reviews and health grade and things like that, and I realized you can't even be picky about that anymore.

You just got to be kind of grateful if you can find any doctor who says that they'll take on a new patient.

ASHLEY GIL DE LAMADRID: The new patient fee ranges, from my experience, between $300 and $450.

And yeah, insurance does not cover that at all in my experience.

KIMBERLY SLADE: I have a number of health problems, so I have attempted to go to the doctor on numerous occasions, every single one, and I'm talking seven or nine -- seven or eight, pardon me, doctors that I've had initial appointments with that have when I go back to reschedule, they are no longer in my network, no longer practicing.

CAROLINE MUSE: I have a lot of pain.

I have arthritis, like, everywhere.

And I finally had to go because I'm just in a lot of pain.

But then I went to get an X-ray and they said my insurance was invalid and I called them and they said it was valid.

So now, I have to wait another, whatever, two, three weeks to get an X-ray.

And so I'm still not being treated.

My hands are killing me and I work really hard, and so it's just really frustrating.

TOM BORROMEO: I needed to see a gastroenterologist about a year ago and I managed to get a 15 minutes call with one and I got charged $900 for that 15 minutes call.

And my insurance company, which was costing me quite a bit of money, would not pay most of it because they said I had a deductible for that.

So I was just really exasperated.

It's all very expensive and the care seems to be sort of inaccessible.

KIMBERLY SLADE: What's going to happen here shortly is I'm going to go to the ER, which is extraordinarily costly and unnecessary, but that's where we have a health care problem and the cost in this country.

Because when it's so difficult to see an actual doctor, people go to the ER, which is exponentially more expensive than just going to your individual doctor.

THERESA DURKIN: I feel that doctors are under a lot of pressure to see as many patients as possible, so they don't give the patient one-on-one attention.

I find that very frustrating as a patient advocate and as a patient myself.

So I just avoid it because it's very disheartening.

JOHN YANG: The voices of some of those who are frustrated with health care.

Dr. Maya Artandi is a clinical professor of primary care and population health at Stanford Medical School.

Dr. Artandi, the things that these people were citing, does that ring true to you?

Is that the sort of thing you hear?

DR. MAYA ARTANDI, Stanford Medical School: Yes, it definitely rings true to me.

It is very hard nowadays to get a primary care doctor.

Access is so minimal and it's very expensive.

JOHN YANG: Why is it hard to find a primary care doctor, not only getting to get an appointment, but sometimes finding one who's taking new patients is difficult?

DR. MAYA ARTANDI: It's a big problem.

We have a primary care crisis in this country.

Personally, I think that primary care is underappreciated, under a paid.

The young doctors don't want to be primary care doctors.

They want to be specialists.

And so we don't have enough primary care doctors.

The primary care doctors we have taken on an enormous amount of work with all the preventative health care, all the follow up visits, all the after-hour computer work, answering messages, and they get burned out.

JOHN YANG: During the pandemic, there were a lot of people who were afraid to go to see the doctor.

They were worried about sitting in the waiting room close to other people.

Have they gotten into the habit of not going to the doctor now?

DR. MAYA ARTANDI: There's still a certain amount of fear, but I think many people did not come to the doctor for three years and so they let their health problems lapse.

Unfortunately, those health problems then got worse.

The diabetes is less well controlled, the blood pressure is less well controlled and now everybody's trying to get in.

And it's frustrating, for us as providers as much as for patients.

JOHN YANG: You talked earlier about the lack of access to primary care physicians.

Is there one segment of the population or a type of patient who's more likely to lack access not be able to see a primary care physician?

DR. MAYA ARTANDI: It has a lot to do with insurances.

Patients who don't have good insurances have it even harder to get primary care doctor.

There are certain insurances that they are not taken by different clinics and those poor patients can't get access even harder for them.

JOHN YANG: And a lot of those patients end up treating the emergency room as their primary care physician.

Obviously, it's more expensive to do that, but what does that do to the system?

DR. MAYA ARTANDI: It is a big problem.

Those patients wait until they are seriously ill and then they do need to go to the emergency room because they are sick.

They need to get admitted to the hospital.

But we also have a lot of other patients who shouldn't come to the emergency room because they just need prescription refills or other things and the emergency rooms are overloaded.

Wait times are really high.

So that's not the good way to get primary care or preventative health care.

DR. MAYA ARTANDI: Has telehealth helped and does it have the possibility of helping solve this problem?

DR. MAYA ARTANDI: I'm a huge fan of telehealth because it does take away a lot of barriers patients have.

Patients don't need to find childcare care, elder care, take time off work because they can do those visits in their lunch break.

So, it is a really great thing to have.

There are other barriers.

Some patients, especially the elderly population, are not as savvy with video visits, so they don't feel comfortable with a telehealth visit.

But overall, I think telehealth is a really great addition to health care.

JOHN YANG: We've also seen the growth in urgent care centers, is that helping?

DR. MAYA ARTANDI: I personally work a lot in urgent care and I've seen so many patients.

And I hear from my patients, oh, I tried to make an appointment with my primary care doctor.

I can't get in.

So, now, as urgent care doctors, we start doing chronic disease management, not just urgent care anymore.

So, now I prescribe the diabetes medication, that blood pressure medication, because it's just too hard to get an appointment with primary care.

JOHN YANG: Another thing we heard from the people around the country talking about their experiences was frustration with insurance, which of course, the doctors, the providers have nothing to do with.

DR. MAYA ARTANDI: I'm as frustrated with insurance as the patients.

There's no transparency.

I order a test.

I don't know if it gets covered.

Every January, the insurance decides what medications they cover and what not.

I have patients who are in the same drug for 20 years, and suddenly the insurance doesn't cover it anymore.

And so, it would help if the insurances were more transparent about what they cover, what they don't cover.

JOHN YANG: What else can be done to take away these frustrations and help people go to the doctor more often or not be frustrated in going to the doctor?

DR. MAYA ARTANDI: I think it's important that everybody has a primary care doctor, because you don't want to wait until you really need a doctor, because then it will take 9, 10 months to see somebody.

So everybody should now make an appointment, check with the insurance, who's a network, and then just make an appointment, meet and greet so you have somebody and then follow up.

Do your preventative health care.

I know people think, oh, I'm healthy, it's not necessary.

But it's important to know if the blood pressure is at goal or not, because that way we then can prevent problems down the line.

JOHN YANG: Dr. Maya Artandi from Stanford Medical School, thank you very much.

DR. MAYA ARTANDI: Of course.

JOHN YANG: Paleontology, the study of fossils is one of the few fields where discoveries can come from experts and amateurs alike.

Ali Rogin is back with a story of some recent astonishing fossil finds.

ALI ROGIN: From the rugged coastline of northeast England.

MARIE WOODS, ARCHAEOLOGIST: I didn't know if what I was looking at was actually what I was thinking I was looking at.

ALI ROGIN: To the sandy beaches of the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland , fossil hunting is a hobby for young and old.

MOLLY SAMPSON, Fossil Hunter: At first, it was farther away, and I thought it was like a big rock.

And I went closer, and I saw that it was a big tooth.

ALI ROGIN: On Christmas morning, nine-year-old Molly Sampson put one of her new presents to good use, a pair of waders perfect to help in the hunt for ancient shark tooth.

MOLLY SAMPSON: I tried to scoop it up with my scooper, but the tooth was too big, and I just reached in and pulled it out of the water.

BRUCE SAMPSON: I think the windshield was 10 degrees, and yeah, she just overhands right in the water and scooped it out.

MOLLY SAMPSON: My hand was freezing after that for, like, oh at least for the time.

ALI ROGIN: I bet.

Fossil hunting runs in this family.

Bruce Sampson got his kids hooked from a young age.

BRUCE SAMPSON: It's so cool to see the enthusiasm and to see them get so excited about something that they find.

And one of the things I always tell the kids when they find something is that if you think about it's pretty cool to think about something that's 15 million years old, that's been sitting out there for all that time, and you're the first person to ever pick it up and hold it.

ALI ROGIN: The Sampsons took their fine to Stephen Godfrey, the curator of paleontology at the Calvert Marine Museum.

BRUCE SAMPSON: He said it was a very good specimen in good condition.

And ... MOLLY SAMPSON: Oh he said that it's about 15 million years old.

ALI ROGIN: Whoa.

MOLLY SAMPSON: Every inch of tooth equals 10 feet of, like, a shark, and it's five inches, so it would have been a 50-foot shark.

She said it was a five-foot lifetime.

STEPHEN GODFREY, CURATOR, CALVERT MARINE MUSEUM: I've told her, and I tell people repeatedly, look, you shouldn't expect to come to Calvert Cliffs and find a fossil like that, because there are people who have spent a lifetime and have not found a large tooth like that.

So, she just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

ALI ROGIN: Millions of years ago, in the Miocene era, this area was underwater.

Time and erosion have left fossils behind for paleontologists and amateur fossil hunters like the Sampsons to discover.

STEPHEN GODFREY: You would think that after 200 years of kind of Western culture collecting fossils from long cover cliffs, that we would know everything that there is to know about both the geology and the diversity of organisms that lived here during the Miocene Epoch.

But in fact, we don't.

And every year, we continue to make new discoveries.

ALI ROGIN: Across the Atlantic Ocean, Marie Woods made one of those new discoveries when she found a fossilized dinosaur footprint along the Yorkshire coast.

MARIE WOODS: Once I got up close and personal with it to kind of realize what it was, I wasn't necessarily aware of what type of dinosaur it was or indeed, the importance of it, the scientific importance of it.

But I knew enough to kind of start the next stages of processing it.

ALI ROGIN: Woods is an archaeologist who studies the medieval period downright modernity when compared to the age of the dinosaurs.

MARIE WOODS: I find it hilarious that I look at things from about 800 years ago.

And here's his footprint from 165 million years ago.

ALI ROGIN: Woods is one of the co-authors of a recently published study that confirmed the footprint was from a giant theropod, a dinosaur group that includes the T. rex.

Even better, the print revealed a new dinosaur behavior squatting.

MARIE WOODS: What they've said is quite significant about this particular print is the fact that it's the only one of its kind in the world that shows the behavior of a dinosaur of this kind actually taking a rest.

ALI ROGIN: I love that idea of it helping tell the story of the fact that these theropods could take rests and just maybe sit and admire the coast.

MARIE WOODS: Exactly.

Sit and relax on a sunny Scarborough day.

ALI ROGIN: To protect the footprint from the elements, fossil collectors carefully removed it from the rocky cliff.

That's when they realized another fossil hunter, Rob Taylor, had spotted the same print, just not fully exposed a few months earlier.

Woods and Taylor share in the historic find.

And though paleontology has been a field dominated by men, woods hopes her discovery will help change that.

MARIE WOODS: It's fantastic, especially for myself, to encourage more young women and, of course, school children to get involved in a science-based subject.

ALI ROGIN: And Molly Sampson's find is proof that neither gender nor age matters when it comes to contributing to science.

STEPHEN GODFREY: Paleontology is one of the disciplines of science where the avocational community, with whom we collaborate regularly, can make a significant contribution.

And so, just like Molly getting out and looking for fossils, there is a large, relatively large population of collectors who are very passionate and know a lot about the geology and paleontology who collect fossils and bring them to our attention.

ALI ROGIN: So tell me about what it takes to be a good fossil hunter?

BRUCE SAMPSON: It's not always easy to find stuff, right?

Sometimes you got to be patient and give out a lot and keep exploring and investigating different things, right?

MOLLY SAMPSON: Yeah like if you see the rocks, like you might not see them on top, but before start digging, you up on top, and then you can scrape the rocks and see if there's anything under them.

ALI ROGIN: Patience, a good eye, and a lot of curiosity.

For "PBS News Weekend," I'm Ali Rogin.

JOHN YANG: And that is "PBS News Weekend" for this Saturday.

I'm John Yang.

For all of my colleagues, thanks for joining us.

See you tomorrow.