Cholera in Haiti, Asthma and Cows, National Parks
UN Admits It Caused Haitian Cholera Outbreak Guest: Rosa Freedman, JD, Professor of Law, Conflict and Global Development at the University of Reading Haitians had known political unrest and grinding poverty prior to the devastating earthquake and floods hit in 2010. But one plight the country had avoided was cholera. That was not a disease found in Haiti until UN peacekeepers brought it with them when they came to help after the earthquake. Since then, cholera has killed at least 10,000 people in Haiti and made hundreds of thousands sick. Asthma and the Amish Guest: Carole Ober, PhD, Professor and Chair of the Department of Human Genetics at the University of Chicago Six million kids in the US have asthma – that’s one out of 11 children, and the number is rising. But what if there were a simple solution to preventing asthma from developing? You just have to live with a cow. A report out in The New England Journal of Medicine finds Amish children who grow up on a family farm, in close proximity to dairy cows, have much lower rates of asthma. And researchers at the University of Chicago believe microbes in the dust have something to do with that. Why Paying Kidnappers Doesn’t Pay Guest: Todd Sandler, PhD, Professor of Economics at the University of Texas - Dallas Just imagine, for a moment, that someone in your immediate family were kidnapped by a terror group in Iraq or Syria. If you pay a million-dollar ransom, your loved one will be released. If you don’t, the result will likely be a gruesome execution broadcast online. You pay the money, right? But since 9-11, the United States has stuck to a strict policy of not making any concessions to terrorist kidnappers – no ransoms, no prisoner swaps. Bending to the terrorist demands will only invite more kidnappings of Americans, US officials have said. In several tragic cases involving American hostages of ISIS and Al Qaeda, not only did the US refuse to pay the ransom, they refused to let the family pay either. And the hostages were killed. National Park Service Looks to the Next 100 Years (Note: this conversation originally aired in May 2016) Guest: Jeremy Barnum, Spokesman for the National Park Service This week marks one hundred years since President Woodrow Wilson signed the act that created the National Park Service. At the time, there were 35 national parks and monuments. Yellowstone was the first – it had already been a national park for 44 years by that time, so clearly, Americans had an inkling that wild spaces and historical places mattered enough to give them special attention – special protection. As the National Park Service turns 100, there are some 400 national parks and 20,000 employees looking after them. Yellowstone and Our Notion of "Wildness" Guest: David Quammen, Author of National Geographic May Issue, “Yellowstone: The Battle for the American West.” Every year people from around the globe flock to Yellowstone National Park. For the rest of this hour we’re going to explore why the oldest national park in the world holds such a grip on our collective imagination: bears, bison and wolves now thrive there and if you’re lucky you’ll be able to snap a photo of one, from your car or on the park trails. But bring your bear spray—grizzlies and cougars use the same trails we do, and that’s how Yellowstone is intended to be—wild. What lessons about co-existing with the wild can, and should, we learn from the grand experiment that is Yellowstone National Park?