Opioid Class Trains Workers To Protect Themselves From Deadly Fentanyl Exposure And More Local News

Speaker 1: 00:00 Good morning. It's April 8th I'm Deb Welsh and you're listening to San Diego news matters. Some delivery drivers, lab workers and emergency responders are taking a unique class this week in San Diego on how to protect themselves against the deadly opioid fentanyl KPBS health reporter Susan Murphy tells us the training comes as opioid overdose. Death rates continue to soar more than 250 people in San Diego County died last year of opioid related causes and 90 of those were a direct result of fentanyl. That's according to preliminary numbers from the medical examiners office. Fentanyl is up to 100 times more powerful than morphine and can be deadly in tiny doses. That's why the day long classes being offered on Friday to protect workers who could be at risk. Stephanie Span is associate director of the Osha training institute at Uc San Diego Extension. Anybody could be exposed to this and not know it and not know that it's actually going to affect their health or or their outcome. Class attendees will learn how to react to potential exposure and receive a kit of protective equipment. Susan Murphy Kpbs News. New Research finds that climate change is putting stress on wetlands in the West Great Basin and that's hurting bird populations. KPB as environment reporter Eric Anderson has details, Speaker 2: 01:20 water conditions linked to climate change are shrinking. The wetland habitats that great basin water birds rely on the basin includes most of Nevada and parts of Utah, Arizona, Oregon, and the eastern edge of California. Susan Hagar is a former United States geological survey researcher. She says warmer temperatures and less rain are effecting wetland habitats. Speaker 3: 01:43 11 of the 14 third we looked at there were significant correlations between changes in climate and a decrease in population. Speaker 2: 01:54 Peg says Western snow melt is arriving too early and not sticking around long enough. She says that affects water. Birds that rely on wetlands for breeding findings are published in the journal scientific reports. Eric Anderson KPBS news Speaker 1: 02:09 just days before a show down in the California legislature over when police can use deadly force. Law enforcement groups are embracing reforms recommended by attorney general Javier Bissera after the Sacramento police shooting of Stephen Clark capital public radio's been Adler reports. There are two rival is a force bills at the state capitol, one backed by civil liberties advocates and community activist would strengthen the legal standard for when police officers can use deadly force from reasonable to necessary. The other pushed by law enforcement groups would leave the reasonable standard in place, but increased training for state and local law enforcement agencies and it's that second bill that's getting amendments. We're going to have statewide policies that have to be included in their own guidelines. Democratic senator on a Cabi Arrow says she's amending her bill to include best practices from progressive cities nationwide and almost all Speaker 4: 03:00 of the attorney general's recommendations. Every police department, every agency, we'd have to send their officers back for retraining. It's a culture shift and the goal would be to make sure that we have alternatives to deadly use of force. So far there's been no committee hearing set for Caballeros Bill. The other measure of faces, it's first committee vote on Tuesday. There's a sense of the capital that it's short on votes, but democratic assembly woman Shirley Weber says she's optimistic. Her bill will advance without major amendments necessary. It will always be the piece that's there and that's the crux in the heart of the bill. So we're not looking at changing necessary, but there's different ways of defining the witness. Exactly, and we are. We're more than willing to talk to folks about how do they define it at the state capitol. I'm Ben Adler, Speaker 1: 03:42 Avocados or just one of many foods, America imports from Mexico, but with worries about a possible border closure. News outlets whipped up fears that this high demand fruit could run out. Capital public radio is politifact. Reporter Chris Nichols found this topic was ripe for a fact check. Speaker 4: 04:00 President Trump appears to have backed away from his threat to shut down the border, but just days ago he warned that Mexico had to stop people from illegally entering the United States. Speaker 5: 04:11 And if they don't stop them with closing the border, they'll close it. We'll keep a close for a long time. I'm not playing games. Speaker 4: 04:18 The U s gets more than 40% of it's imported fruits and vegetables from Mexico, yet news outlets and late night comedians have focused mainly on the fate of one creamy green fruit. Speaker 5: 04:29 If imports from Mexico or stopped today, Americans would run out of Avocados in three weeks. Speaker 4: 04:35 That really true. What about California's avocado growers? Couldn't they step in and replace the lost supply? Uc Davis AG economist Dan Sumner says, America now imports 80% of its Avocados, most of them from Mexico, California, which ones provided a much larger share, contributes less than 20% Speaker 2: 04:55 we would have vastly fewer Avocados. There's just not enough in California to satisfy what the country has gotten used to consuming. Speaker 4: 05:02 Some agreed that most avocados would run out in a matter of weeks, though not all prices would spike. He says, and there would probably be some very expensive avocados leftover in the end, the news headlines and even the comedians got this one just about right. We rated it mostly true in Sacramento. I'm Chris Nichols, Speaker 1: 05:24 read full versions of all our fact checks@politifact.com slash California even longtime California. It's might be surprised to learn of modern day glaciers in this date, but the fact is remnants of the Lisle glacier and Yosemite national park or about to disappear report her Daniel Dwayne told KPBS is Mark Sauer what the glaciers demise tells us about our changing world. Old. Speaker 4: 05:49 When John Muir first identified this thing as a glacier, it was about 13 million square feet. Today the remnant ice field is three square feet. So there's still a fairly big ice field up there. You can still hike up and look at it and see the melting out remnants. But you know as her, yeah, as recently as 30 or 40 years ago, a hiker up into that part of the high country would have seen quite a large and still moving um, active glacier. The remnants of it though, I mean you're, you're describing the story or you can I guess a subjectively or make the call on this, but the glacier may actually be gone or dead or just remnants left. No, right. Yeah. So the, you know, the, the definition of a glacier includes downhill movement. So glaciers accumulate snow up high in there. You know, in the higher they're higher reaches, convert that snow slowly over time into ice. Speaker 4: 06:41 And then ice has a certain, almost kind of a viscosity, um, under the pressure of gravity that draws it slowly downhill in a kind of creeping molasses like riverine movement. That movement is what defines a glacier and separates it from a mere ice field. The Lyle had that movement for quite a long time. What's it like being on what's left of loyal glacier? If you didn't know that it was melting out, I think it would feel quite beautiful at that. You know, you're, you're at almost 13,000 feet on this rocky remote mountain side that's quite steep and there's, this still feels like quite a big ice field. I think it covers about 60 acres perched on this slope. You know, if you win when you walk up onto it, it's like being a midst a thousand tiny little streams of perfectly pristine ice melt water that you could just lap up with your tongue. Speaker 4: 07:35 It's that clean. Um, and there's this sound of trickling in Gurgling of a million little clean creeks and that sound is so soothing to the human ear, you know, that we buy white noise machines that produce it for us. There's something kind of confusing about hearing that sound, you know, and knowing that it's the sound of the death of this thing and that every drop of water is one less drop of ice sustaining. Right. Reading his story, I'm struck that uh, the glaciers are almost kind of time machines and then what are they tell us about the rapidly changing climate. I mean, one thing they tell us is that our climate is changing really, really fast. Another thing that the Lyle tells us is that he or suggests is that we humans have been disrupting the earth's climate for somewhat longer than we've realized that there, there are fluctuations in the earth's climate back for several hundred. Speaker 4: 08:29 You know, even a few thousand years that may have had to do with the rise of human agriculture with this little ice age that I mentioned was this very peculiar abrupt cooling period that started oddly about the time of the black death in Europe when the bubonic plague wiped out about a third of the population of Europe and cratered agriculture and allowed to sort of reforestation that would have taken carbon out of the, it seems to have been worsened by the deaths of 50 plus million indigenous people in the new world as a result of disease as brought by Europeans to the new world, thus more cratering of agriculture, more reforestation. And then it, the little ice age sort of flipped ended. And are the climate flipped toward runaway warming curiously between about 1850 and 1900 as the industrial revolution took off and the atmosphere began to fill again with carbon, the birth life and very abrupt death of the Lyle are all sort of a story of um, the ways in which we are changing the atmosphere that supports us in rather dramatic ways. Without conscious plan. Speaker 1: 09:41 I've been speaking with writer Daniel Dwayne, his story, what remains, describes the rise and fall of Lyell glacier in Yosemite national park. Thanks, Daniel. Thank you. Thanks for listening to KPBS a San Diego news matters podcast. For more local stories, go to k pbs.org.