SDSU Gets Feedback On Mission Valley Campus Expansion And More Local News
Speaker 1: 00:00 It's Friday, September 13th I'm Priya Schreder and you're listening to San Diego news matters from KPBS coming up. Residents are getting a better picture of development plans for SDSU West and there is an investigation into finding the cause of these vaping related illnesses. Speaker 2: 00:18 Sometimes you need large numbers of cases to understand small details that that might be able to crack the case so to speak. Speaker 1: 00:26 San Diego is playing a role that and more San Diego new stories coming up. Thank you for joining us for San Diego News Matters. I'm Priya. Sure either a southern California lawmakers bid to keep offshore oil rigs from fouling the Pacific and Atlantic coastlines got a boost and Congress KPBS environment reporter Eric Anderson has details. Speaker 3: 00:50 A bill bending offshore oil drilling in u s coastal waters passed in the House of Representatives, southern California Congressman Mike Levin is a sponsor and he talked about the measure last week in Encinitas. Speaker 4: 01:01 These are things that we need to do that we need to stand up strongly for because this administration, this department of Interior, it's not that they are too close to the oil industry, it's that they are the oil industry. Speaker 3: 01:15 HR 1941 is the first piece of legislation that love and cosponsored and got passed. The Democrat represents the State's 50th Congressional district, which includes parts of San Diego and Orange County. It's not clear if the measure has enough support to pass in the u s senate. Eric Anderson KPBS news Speaker 1: 01:33 Wednesday night, a supreme court ruling allowed a Trump administration policy limiting asylum at the country, southern border to go into effect. KPBS reporter Max Rivlin Nadler spoke to asylum seekers in Tijuana Thursday morning as they dealt with the fallout from this decision. Speaker 5: 01:50 Anthony Pinera has been waiting four months for his number to be called at the Santa Thedro port of entry. He fled El Salvador after he says he was targeted by gangs, but because of the 23 year old Pinera went through another country on his way to the u s border, you will most likely now be denied asylum. According to the new Trump administration rule. Still, he says he can't go back. He won't apply for asylum in another country either. Speaker 2: 02:16 All Central America is the same. It's the worst. Mexico. How many had been murdered? Same as Central America and South America too. We can't go to Speaker 5: 02:24 Ken. Jerez number was finally called on Thursday, but it might've already been too late. His future in the United States like migrants who waited with him from places like Cameroon and Venezuela are now tied to core challenges that might stretch. As far as 2021 max with Linda Adler, k PBS news, Speaker 1: 02:42 San Diego State University is presenting its development plans for the Mission Valley Stadium site. KPBS Metro reporter Andrew Bowen says, members of the public are weighing in Speaker 5: 02:53 a few dozen people came to an open house on Thursday to learn more about how SDSU is. Expansion will impact everything from water quality to traffic. Laura Shin, the university's director of planning, says congestion in the area will likely get worse, but that the site will make better use of the trolley and feature a big network of biking and walking trails. Speaker 6: 03:13 We may not need 5,000 parking spaces in 10 15 years. I mean, I, we don't really have a crystal ball, so we don't know exactly where we're going, but we're trying to plan ahead for a variety of contingencies and balance all of that. Speaker 5: 03:26 SDSU plans to build a new smaller stadium by 2022 planes for apartments, retail and research space likely won't be fully realized for another 15 years after that. Andrew Bowen and KPBS News, Speaker 1: 03:39 Icarus, interstellar wants to see space travel become a reality. One way it works toward that goal is by engaging artists, scientists, entrepreneurs, and the general public through a biennial event called starship congress KPBS arts reporter Beth Alka, Amando previews this year's event that begins tomorrow at the San Diego Erin's space museum. Speaker 6: 04:01 Interstellar flight has sometimes been called humankind's greatest challenge. Icarus. Interstellar has been working for nearly a decade with the space and interstellar community to study, research and encourage thinking outside the box to bring forth ideas, concepts, and innovations that could bring us closer to space travel and dre us. The olis got interested in the topic as a child watching star trek. Now we serve this president of Icarus interstellar, which sponsors the starship congress. Speaker 7: 04:30 The theme for this year's conference is is bending metal starship Congress 2019 Ben Metal is a conference where we call on entrepreneurs, scientists, thinkers, and to come and bring us ideas for innovations that would help construct a star ship at some point in the future. But we ask a difficult question. We ask how would those innovations find a market and be a successful business on earth? Today? Speaker 6: 04:56 Starship congress runs through Sunday at the San Diego Air and space museum panel topics range from microbots as the seeds of interstellar colonization to starship hacking to futurism for financier's bath like a Mondo KPBS news. Speaker 1: 05:12 New Research from the Navy highlights the need for safely storing firearms. KPBS military reporter Steve Walsh says, researchers found troops almost always used their personal guns to kill themselves. Speaker 5: 05:25 The research shows that troops who have contemplated suicide are much less likely to store their guns safely. Right. Brian is with the National Center for Veterans Studies at the University of Utah, which led this study. Speaker 8: 05:36 The military has I think a lot of options available that many of us who are outside the military don't have and so you know, many military installations already require, for instance, that if a service member is living on base that they store their weapons in an armory, which is a fantastic strategy solution Speaker 5: 05:55 at the moment. The Pentagon doesn't have a consistent policy for how to store personal weapons. That naval health research center in San Diego surveyed the troops. The study appears in the Journal of the American Medical Association online. Steve Walsh KPBS news. Speaker 1: 06:11 There was another death this week from a national outbreak of an unusual vaping related illness. So far. San Diego has 12 confirmed cases with no deaths. KPBS health reporter Taryn Mento talks to the county health departments. Dr. Eric McDonald about treating the disease while working to solve the mystery. Speaker 6: 06:31 Well, Dr. McDonald, thank you for speaking with me. It's my pleasure. What's the latest on the cases in San Diego? Speaker 2: 06:36 Well, it's an interesting illness because it's not reportable. It's not one of the ones we'd known about until recently, but one of the things that is supposed to be reported is unusual diseases and that's exactly what this is. We have 12 cases that have been reported so far in San Diego. They range in age from 17 to 70 with the median at about 38 which is a little older than some of the cases across the rest of the country. They ran the rest of the country is reporting a lot of, uh, teenagers and young adults. Speaker 6: 07:05 Are these patients still currently hospitalized or all 12 currently in the hospital have some be been released. Speaker 2: 07:11 There was one patient that had to be readmitted to the hospital and that's one of the things we don't know about this illness is really what are the longterm effects. Certainly there's some dramatic short term effects where individuals are hospitalized, put in the intensive care unit, a, sometimes put on breathing machines. This has happened here in San Diego. Uh, but that's the short term problem. Nobody really knows what the longterm problems, uh, both of this syndrome and frankly of using these vaping products might be. Speaker 6: 07:37 Why don't we know yet what's causing this? Speaker 2: 07:40 That's a great question. Uh, and the, the, the sort of follow on is how long has this really been going on? I mean, is it just something that, because some doctors noticed it and published it, uh, and other doctors started looking that we're seeing something that was always there, uh, or, uh, are the numbers of people who are vaping just getting to a critical mass that an uncommon result of vaping is now showing up more frequently? Or is there something new being introduced into different vaping products, uh, that is in fact causing these, it could be any or all of those. We have been able to get samples from two of our 12 patients and seen Diego and sent those samples up to the state cannabis. Um, uh, uh, laboratory at, uh, the Department of Public Health. Some of the laboratories across the country have noted that some of the cannabis products have had vitamin E in them and that's not something that you would normally expect to find. Now the question is, is that related or is that just a red herring? And we don't really know until we can connect all the dots. Speaker 6: 08:45 You just said that a samples from two of the 12 patients that we sent to the state, is that the county's main role, just a, you know, a, a middleman here or is, are you Speaker 1: 08:56 doing more on the ground asking questions, collecting data and doing your own investigation? Speaker 2: 09:00 Well, uh, it's a little bit of both. This is a national investigation and they, uh, have established a national database with standard questions that all of the local jurisdictions are feeding up to the CDC because sometimes you need large numbers of cases to understand small details that that might be able to crack the case, so to speak. But for our individual cases here in San Diego, they have to be interviewed. They have to be looked into. We ask if they've got product available. And again, in two of the cases we were able to, to identify those, have those are routed through our public health lab to the state lab. And of course we track all of that information, uh, and give feedback to the providers. In fact, if we find things other than knowing that all of our cases, uh, bought products that were canaveroid products and knowing that many of them bought it from pop up shops or over the internet, which is something that we're trying to counsel against. Speaker 2: 09:57 We haven't seen any other specific commonalities between our patients. Anything I missed that I didn't ask this? The signs and symptoms people have of these illnesses? Uh, it turns out that it's not just a respiratory symptoms. People have, um, some of the initial symptoms people have after vaping can be a nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain and diarrhea leading then to, um, respiratory symptoms of cough and shortness of breath. And so one of the messages that we have is if you have those kinds of symptoms and you're seeking medical care, which you should, um, you should tell your doctor about all the things that you do, uh, the nutritional supplements you take, the medications that you're on, and the products that you might be using in vaping, because it might actually affect what your doctor thinks of in terms of what would be causing your symptoms. Well, thank you very much for your time, Dr. It's my pleasure. Yeah. Okay, thanks. Speaker 1: 10:47 That was KPBS reporter Taron Mento speaking with the director of the county's epidemiology and immunization services branch, Dr. Eric McDonald. Thanks for listening to San Diego News matters. For more KPBS podcasts, go to kpbs.org/podcasts.
