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The AIH Transcript for April 16, 2020

Hosts: Piya Chattopadhyay and Chris Howden

Prologue

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: Hello, I'm Piya Chattopadhyay, sitting in for Carol Off.

CHRIS HOWDEN: Good evening. I'm Chris Howden. This is As It Happens.

[Music: Theme]

CH: Tonight:

PC: Delayed reaction. A Conservative MP has some questions for the WHO about its handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, such as whether or not it acted as quickly as it could have -- questions he had planned to ask at a committee meeting that's just been cancelled.

CH: She knew it would be rough, but she didn't know it would be this rough. We check in with the Maryland nurse who answered New York's call for help.

PC: So long. A marine scientist in Australia has stumbled across an organism that is likely the lengthiest creature ever seen and quite possibly the strangest too.

CH: Test case. The Ontario government says it's expanding its coronavirus testing. But one doctor at a long term care centre says while he managed to get a special exemption for the testing his patients and staff need, other homes aren't so lucky.

PC: Driven to distraction. While everyone else has been staying put, a bureaucratic snafu forced a Canadian snowbird to drive across several provinces to find a place to stay and then drive all the way back again.

CH: And we've tried to catch a lot of fish stories. And tonight we've got two that didn't get away. Both of which set a new goldfish standard. As It Happens. The Thursday Edition. Radio whose guests are forthcoming even if their pets are a little koi.

[Music: Theme]

Part 1: Why the Conservative Party wants answers about WHO's handling of COVID-19

WHO Conservative Critic

Guest: Matt Jeneroux

CH: Justin Trudeau says the world needs to get along during a pandemic and the World Health Organization can help us do that. The Prime Minister stopped short of criticizing US President Donald Trump's controversial decision to freeze WHO funding yesterday. President Trump has accused the organization of mismanaging the threat of COVID-19 and of blindly following China's lead. And some Canadian Conservative MPs have questions on that subject as well. A parliamentary health committee invited senior Canadian WHO, Dr. Bruce Aylward to answer tough questions about the organization's handling of the virus this week. But on Tuesday, Dr. Aylward cancelled his appearance. Matt Jeneroux is the Tory MP who sent Dr. Aylward the invite. We reached him in Ottawa.

PC: Mr. Jeneroux, what answers were you hoping to get from Dr. Bruce Aylward from the WHO this week?

MATT JENEROUX: Yeah. So I think if you look back to early January, the WHO was recommending that there was no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission. Then 10 days later, the decision was that, well, there was evidence of that. Which is fair. But again, I want to ask Mr. Aylward why those decisions were made. Again, the closing of the borders. I want to ask the questions as to why the decision to recommend that the borders stay open and then eventually the decision was made to close them when other countries were closing the borders. Masks -- we just saw last week, a decision that now masks are being recommended to wear out in public places. I think a lot of those questions are reasonable questions that Canadians have right now and want to get some answers to that.

PC: So let me just ask you about a couple of those things. Because the scientific evidence was and is changing all the time. The WHO and public health agencies said they're always working off the best evidence of the time and that things might change. So when you bring up your questions about human-to-human transmission, the WHO's answer would be, well, at the time we were working on the best evidence we had.

MJ: Absolutely. And that's fair. We want to hear Mr. Aylward provide that evidence to the committee -- when there was evidence at the time from other countries that were saying, well, it is human-to-human transmission. So, you know, it's a fair question to ask Mr. Aylward where he may have a tremendous response for that. But again, without having met the committee, it's difficult to really know.

PC: Some of the concerns you have raised are common to the concerns US President Donald Trump laid out this week when he froze American funding to the World Health Organization. What do you think of the American president's decision?

MJ: Yes. We certainly don't want to confuse this. Our intent is to come in and have questions asked and answered at committee. And I think questions that Canadians are asking certainly aren't going as far as requesting the withdrawal of funding. You know I guess, the president's prerogative -- they're the number one contributor to the WHO to ask these questions as well. But from our perspective, certainly want to get behind some of the decisions that were made by Dr. Tam and others when following the advice from the WHO.

PC: Do you think Canada should consider freezing funds to the World Health Organization?

MJ: We're significantly down the chain of funding, where there's a number of other countries ahead of us. I certainly think there's a benefit to having an organization like the WHO, but I think it's also an equal benefit to having the transparency related to that. And that's why we're trying to get Mr. Aylward to our committee to ask some of those questions. You know, there's a number of foundations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Fund, who fund significantly more than any countries and Canada. So, you know, it's a question again of this advice that was being followed by physicians here in Canada. And we want to understand some of the decisions we made at the WHO as to why that advice was being given.

PC: The WHO had been sounding the alarm about COVID-19 before Chinese officials had even started publicizing it. They sounded more alarms more frequently and earlier than any national government did. What more do you think the WHO could have done to stem the tide of COVID-19?

MJ: You've probably written one of my questions for me, Piya. Certainly there's a role for WHO. And, you know, the timing of when they called this a global pandemic, I believe it was March 10th-11th. We're curious as to the timing of that as well. I think, again, having some of these questions answered and in terms of that timing specifically will be important because our committee was struck with the sole purpose, a nonpartisan committee, struck with the sole purpose of receiving evidence concerning matters related to the government's response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We want to find the answers in real time now, but also prepare for any potential pandemics and also prepare for life after this pandemic, which we all know will be significantly different.

PC: One of the areas that has been criticized in terms of the WHO is its data. But that data comes directly from individual countries. So should we be blaming the WHO or rather the countries that provided the data?

MJ: Yeah. You've hit on something that has had a lot of concerns, things that we've heard raised when it comes to data and the transparency of data. And I go on the WHO website probably two or three times a day just looking at the updated data and relying on it and wanting to make sure that that's correct data I think is a fair and reasonable thing, not just for Canadians, but for everyone to understand. You know, the one thing that jumps out at me is that you look at a country like China and they loop in the data with Taiwan. And we know that they put a very different course in terms of how many cases, how many deaths have occurred and just approaches that have happened there. So wondering why Taiwan isn't separated from China. And I'm hoping Mr. Aylward will be able to shed some light on that.

PC: With the US pulling back on funding and concerns about China perhaps playing too large a role, is this an opportunity for Canada, for our country to fill that vacuum at the WHO?

MJ: I would argue absolutely. Again, the WHO does have a role to play, and I think it's that coordinating role and that leadership role. I think there have also been lots of questions raised, though, about the funding partners. You know, contrary to popular opinion, China isn't the number one funder. They're actually also quite far down the list in terms of other countries, if you add up the contributions and the voluntary contributions, but thinking that there's probably a good role for Canada to play even if it's just on increasing the transparency of some of this information. And we're hopeful after this, we'll be able to provide some recommendations at committee and Mr. Aylward will be able to join us -- so hopefully he can shed some light on some of that.

PC: Okay. Mr. Jeneroux, we'll leave it there. Thank you very much for joining us today.I appreciate it.

MJ: Appreciate it. Stay well and keep safe. Take care.

PC: You as well.

CH: Matt Jeneroux is the Conservative Party's health critic. We reached him in Ottawa. And you can find more on this story on our webpage: cbc.ca/aih.

[Music]

Ontario Testing Expansion

Guest: Barry Roth

CH: Doug Ford says his province is catching up. As we told you last week, Ontario has been slower than other provinces to ramp up the testing necessary to identify and isolate cases of COVID-19. Now there are outbreaks underway in 104 Ontario care homes. This afternoon, Premier Ford gave the following update.

[sc]

DOUG FORD: I promised by today we'd be testing 8000 people a day. Well, today we're at over 9000 COVID-19 test. We'll continue to expand testing, testing more people in priority groups. We've expanded our testing guidelines. We're making sure we're testing the people who need our support the most. We'll be testing at homeless shelters, in woman shelters, homes for people with disabilities. We'll be testing women who are pregnant, and newborns, people who are undergoing chemotherapy, dialysis, or requiring transplants. Because my top priority is making sure no one in this province is left behind.

[/sc]

CH: That was Ontario Premier Doug Ford. But the new guidelines still restrict testing to patients and staff of hospitals and care homes who are showing symptoms of COVID-19. When we spoke to Dr. Barry Roth last week, he was frustrated by the lack of testing for his residents and staff. He's the medical director of three long term care homes in southern Ontario. We reached Dr. Barry Roth in Tillsonburg, Ontario.

PC: Dr. Roth, Premier Ford says that under the province's new guidelines, they are testing the people who need it the most. Are you satisfied with what's going on where you are?

BARRY ROTH: Well, I'm very satisfied with our home now. We got there and I can explain to you how we got there. But it's interesting that last week when I spoke to Carol, she said to me there's a big shadow that falls between what the premier says and what actually happens in reality. And last week, she was absolutely right. The premier expanded testing last week, and we were hopeful that that meant the asymptomatic and the staff in our long term care home -- when, in fact, that's not what transpired. Last week, we were granted the right to swaby new admissions that were asymptomatic either from the community or from home or from hospitals. But we're a minority amongst long term care facilities that are doing that.

PC: And so all the residents in the facilities where you work, and all of the staff, whether they have symptoms or not, are being tested for COVID-19 as of today?

BR: Starting Tuesday, we started testing every resident, swabbing every resident and every staff member. And by next week, we'll have everybody done.

PC: And as you said, you are an exception, so to speak. And why is that?

BR: That's an excellent question. I think that, again, dealing with public health was difficult. They have issues. I don't know if it's a capacity issue. It wasn't until our CAO of our county and our administrator got involved in saying to public health, look, that we need this. Did we get action? We were limited the number of swabs we could use. So I don't even have the answer to whether capacity is the issue or what. They would say to me that we need to focus swabbing where the concern is. My argument is the concern is nursing homes.

PC: Have you had an outbreak or any cases COVID-19 in the places where you work?

BR: No, we have not. There's three long term care homes where I'm the medical director at -- and no, we have not had a case.

PC: Have you had anyone in the last couple of days that you've been worried about that hadn't been tested that you think should have?

BR: Yes. Yes. And these typically, though, prior to Tuesday when we now can swab everybody asymptomatic or not, prior to that if we had somebody that was asymptomatic, who was a contact of somebody that we were suspicious of and swabbed, we would not be allowed to swab them. But now we have swabbed. We've gone from unit to unit and swabbed everybody.

PC: The province maintains that it is not a smart use of limited resources to test staff and patients who are showing no signs of infection. How do you respond?

BR: So my argument would be that globally we have recognized evidence that the asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic transmitter is perpetuating this pandemic. How did COVID-19 get into these homes? It got into these homes by somebody that's carried it in, whether it was prior to our lockdown or whether it's the staff bringing it in. Our lockdown now has been in effect for weeks. We were one of the first homes to passively and actively screen people, to have the staff wear masks, to mandate that staff can't work other than in one facility. So we know if the virus gets in, it's got to get in from the outside. So we need to test. We need to test to make sure that people that are there don't have it. And we need to test to make sure the people that are coming in don't have it. Otherwise, we're playing catch up and we're in the dark.

PC: And so as of today, given what the premier has announced -- are you satisfied that the level of testing that needs to happen is happening or are there still gaps that you see?

BR: Well, there's colleagues I have, medical directors from other nursing homes that are not doing what I'm doing and not doing what we're doing. So I think obviously that's going to ramp up testing more. I hope they're allowed to do it. I don't see why they wouldn't. But that's certainly going to put a burden on the system. And is that something the system can take? I'm not the one that can answer that.

PC: And not to sound defensive, but you were sort of the squeaky wheel that got the grease, right? They said, yeah, we'll test all your residents and all your staff. And so this isn't happening universally. Is that what it's going to take for other medical directors to be squeaky wheels?

BR: Yeah, I don't know. Good question. We're not Woodstock and Oxford County -- not trying to be offensive. We just feel we're the best people in the best position to determine what's the best way to protect the residents we cherish and the staff that we cherish. We need to protect each other and we're a family there. So I think it is important that politicians, public health recognize that we're the best resource to decide what's the best approach. Somebody needs to ask us.

PC: And so if you could say one thing to Ontario's health minister, the premier, at this point, what would it be?

BR: Well, I think, you know, I pick up the paper every day or online and read what's happening in nursing homes, and it's frightening. I think that we need to focus where the frontline is changed. I have colleagues in hospitals. I go to the hospital. This pandemic has not turned out the way that we were predicting it was going to. We now see where the problem has focused in. It's on nursing homes and we need to focus our resources there.

PC: Dr. Roth, I appreciate you joining this program once again. Thank you very much for your time.

BR: Okay. Thank you.

CH: Dr. Barry Roth is the medical director of three long term care homes in southern Ontario. We reached him in Tillsonburg.

[Music]

Barry Humberstone

CH: Nowadays, most of us aren't getting out of the house much. Meanwhile, Barry Humberstone can't seem to get off the road. The Canadian Snowbird recently travelled from Florida to Northport, P.E.I., where he moved last year. But when Mr. Humberstone reached the Confederation Bridge, he was turned away because of COVID-19 restrictions. Officials wouldn't let him cross because his driver's license, car registration, and health card are all still from Ontario. So Mr. Humberstone headed west to Ontario to quarantine with relatives there. Yesterday, Barry Humberstone spoke with the CBC's Sara Fraser from his car.

[sc]

BARRY HUMBERSTONE: My girlfriend lives in Florida and I stay there in the winter. And I bought this place in P.E.I. last May. Now the girl, I bought it off, she lived there all year round before I got there. But my thing is, I've been a snowbird. I've been living in Florida for the last eight winters. And I come to Canada for six months and I stay six months in America. They say, well, that's a cottage. Well, it's not a cottage for me, because that's my principal residence. I bought a truck there too. I also have a truck with P.E.I. plates on it.

SARA FRASER: How did that end up when you insisted that you are a P.E.I resident now?

BARRY HUMBERSTONE: They said I have no way of proving it. And there's nothing they could do for me. They made me go back to New Brunswick.

SARA FRASER: So they asked you to turn the car around?

BARRY HUMBERSTONE: Yeah. And then I did. And then when I got to New Brunswick, they pulled me in there. And they told me that if I stayed a night in New Brunswick, I would have to stay 14 nights. I've been in my car for two days now. And I had everything set up at my house. I had enough food for two weeks. I had the heat and I had the water on. It was all ready to go.

[/sc]

CH: That's Barry Humberstone speaking to the CBC on his way to Ontario yesterday. The Prince Edward Island man was turned away at the Confederation Bridge for not having sufficient proof of residents. Mr. Humberstone made it to Kingston, Ontario. Since then, he's been able to obtain the proper documentation. So by now, he should be on his way home, finally to Northport, P.E.I.

[Music]

Weird String Creature

Guest: Nerida Wilson

CH: First, if you are not a marine biologist, let me introduce you to Siphonophore -- a word meaning pelagic hydrozoans made up of polyps. It's less clear what those words mean, but I'm assuming and really hoping our guest will be able to explain. Because she was part of a group of scientists in Western Australia who discovered a never before seen Siphonophore in a protected bio region off the coast of that continent. And they say it is the longest animal on earth. Nerida Wilson is the manager of the Molecular Systematics Unit at the Western Australian Museum, and she was the lead researcher on the expedition. We reached her in Perth.

PC: Nerida, first off, just describe this strange creature for us.

NERIDA WILSON: Yeah. It sort of is a strange spiral or wide spiral with a few lines running across it. So it's just an enormous spiral floating in the water column.

PC: Okay. And how long was this spiral species string, the one that scientists found -- that you found?

NW: Yeah, there's a lot of conjecture about how long it really is. The ROV pilot took an estimate of the outer ring of the spiral and it seemed to be around 47 metres long. Quite big. [Chuckles] But we're in the process of trying to measure it more accurately. And we'll try and update the world when we get the final word on that.

PC: And how on earth, or underwater I should say, did scientists even find this thing? Like how did the discovery go down?

NW: Yeah, like most interesting things, completely by accident. We were carrying out some surveys on the animals that live on the seafloor in the deep sea there. But of course, to bring the remotely operated vehicle up to the surface again, you have to commute through that water column for a couple of hours. And so we tend to have at least one or two scientists watching on the camera because you never know what you might stumble across. And this particular day, it was the amazing Siphonophore.

PC: So help me understand this creature a little more. I've got a visual in my head going on. But what is a Siphonophore? And how do they even get so long?

NW: Yeah, they're really strange animals. [Chuckles] They're actually colonial animals. So they're made up of lots and lots of little clones that all work together to kind of form one organism. So you'll have a little group of clones that somehow communicate with each other and decide, well, we're going to take over the role of feeding and another group of clones will take over the role of reproduction and they all kind of work together. So kind of act like little organs, I guess, in a normal animal. But they all work together to just kind of be one thing.

PC: And is that how they get so long? It's that more and more clones are joining up, so to speak.

NW: Yeah, I'm not really sure how they decide their larger size. There could be constraints when it comes to just holding yourself together or all kinds of different pressures that we don't really understand.

PC: Do we understand its role in the world?

NW: Well, I think like most animals, it lives, it feeds, it reproduces. I don't like to get too philosophical about why things exist. That's a whole different ball game. [Chuckles]

PC: Okay. Thinking about sea creatures that I would recognize or most people recognize, what would you liken them to?

NW: A Siphonophore that people might be more familiar with would be a Portuguese man o' war or we call it in Australia a "bluebottle." They have a float on the top and tentacles and sting people, which is why people care about them.

PC: Like a jellyfish?

NW: Yeah, they are like a jellyfish. But jellyfish or true sea jellies are not colonial. But that's probably the most similar. They are closely related to corals and anemones. But the sea jellies are probably the thing that you would liken them to the most.

PC: And as you say, there will be some more measurements to figure out exactly how long this string animal is. But right now, you're going with about 47 metres -- about 150 feet. That's three times the length of like a humpback whale or something like that, isn't it?

NW: Yeah. And that estimate was just for the outer ring of the spiral. So it hadn't measured any of the other part of the spiral at all.

PC: Okay. And so when you realize this thing is very very long, what's the reaction?

NW: Well, when we first stumbled across it, you know, as I said, most people had already left the control room. But because there are cameras up throughout the vessel showing what you can see on that camera, people saw it and started streaming into the control room and were very excited. So it was a really incredible moment to see it. I think the spiral nature of it and just sitting in the water column was just very unusual. Normally they just kind of hang like a piece of string. So I think we all knew we were seeing something pretty special.

PC: It is not the only thing you found on this expedition. What else did you and your colleagues discover when you were down in the deep seas?

NW: Yes. Well, animals closer to my heart live on the bottom of the ocean. [Chuckles] But we did find some actually amazing sea cucumbers. They have weird long tails. They look a bit like a squirrel. So we nicknamed them "sea squirrels." We also saw incredible giant hydroids. So they're kind of hard to explain, but just like a single polyp of an animal, but it's standing about a metre or so off the surface. It just absolutely stunning animals, amazing deep-sea fish and just all kinds of incredible creatures.

PC: And so now, in addition to doing some measurements of this Siphonophore, is there more research into the specific animal?

NW: Yeah, absolutely. So one of the tools that taxonomists used to identify and describe species, you know, we're often looking at the shape of different cells and all those sorts of things. But we also often now use DNA. And so that's kind of my major contribution is to help people use that data as best as possible to identify all of the animals that we found. So on a trip like this, we have a long period of planning and then we have a month long expedition where we intensively gather samples and then we spend the next few years identifying species. And if there are new species that need a name and doing those descriptions. So that's a very long process at the end of that.

PC: Well, we look forward to finding out more about this creature as your research goes on. Thank you very much for joining us.

NW: Thank you so much.

CH: Nerida Wilson is the manager of the Molecular Systematics Unit at Western Australian Museum and she was the lead researcher on that expedition. We reached her in Perth.

[Music]

PC: You've been talking to families who have people in the hospital.

BS: Yes. There's been several that have called a lot throughout the shifts to try and get updates.

PC: What do you say to them?

BS: I try to be honest. I know last week I had a patient who I thought was doing fairly well, although sick but stable sick. And so I had told the family that was my thought on what was going on. And unfortunately, that patient passed away after I left. So that's kind of...that's hard. It makes me feel guilty because I said these positive things to family and then the outcome was something else.

PC: It sounds incredibly difficult both physically and mentally.

BS: It is.

PC: And so also, when we spoke last time, you said, you know, I gotta do this, just something I gotta do, I want to do this. Do you still stand by that?

BS: Even more so. Now that I'm up there and I see the chaos and the overwhelming amount of patients that are there, and I hear that nurses are getting sick. There aren't enough nurses to go around. I really do feel that I need to be there and that I am helping to make a difference.

PC: And are you getting the protections that you need to do your job? We have heard, of course, about the shortages of equipment and PPE. What has your experience been?

BS: I do feel that I've been protected. We were given goggles. We have a face shield. We have gowns to wear. And then we are given the N95 mask as well as surgical masks. In a normal day to day life, when there's not a pandemic, you would ultimately throw away these masks and get a new one every time we're being asked to reuse it for five shifts or until it's soiled, which isn't optimal. But again, with the whole world needing the same supplies, you kind of have to make do with what you can.

PC: You answered the call by the governor of New York for health care workers to come to his state. Are there a lot of others who have also answered that call, a lot of nurses like you from out of state who've come to help?

BS: Yes. So at the hospital I'm at it seems that there are several agency nurses and I've met some from Florida, some from Alaska. The military is also there from out of state. So a lot of people have shown up to help.

PC: You wanted to kind of get out the door and get working when we spoke. But it took it a longer time for you to get approved to work at this hospital, didn't it?

BS: It did. Yeah. Unfortunately, it ends up taking about two weeks for everything to go through.

PC: What was the delay about?

BS: I think the delay is that the hospitals are so overwhelmed with trying to get agency nurses in there and having to deal with their own staff shortages that it just took a while longer to get everything straightened out.

PC: And so now you've completed four shifts. And I should remind our listeners that this is what you're doing in your quote unquote, spare time. You have not only a husband back in Maryland, but a full-time job. So how long do you plan on continuing to do this?

BS: Well, my four week contract will be up in three more weeks and then I am trying to extend it a little bit longer.

PC: Wow. You want to keep doing this work.

BS: I do. I feel that it's needed.

PC: And what about your parents and your husband?

BS: My husband has been extremely supportive. His job is closed right now, so he has been driving me so that I can rest while we're going up there. And the rest of my family has also been extremely supportive. They're just very worried.

PC: And very proud, I imagine.

BS: Yes.

PC: You also said when we spoke a few weeks ago that it wasn't a matter of if you would get the coronavirus, but a matter of when. Do you still feel that way?

BS: I do. The whole hospital almost everyone has coronavirus. And everyone is going around the hospital. The germs are everywhere. There's just no way it can all be cleaned. So even though you're careful and you wear a mask and everything, there's still such a high risk.

PC: And seeing people get very very ill from COVID-19, how does that make you feel about your own potential experience of getting this virus?

BS: It's worrisome. There's several nurses, doctors, health care workers in the news that are young and otherwise healthy and they have gotten critically ill from this. And some have even died. So I definitely do think about that. But like I said, I just really feel that I'm needed there. So I'm going to keep helping.

PC: Keep up the good work. Stay healthy, Bailey, and thank you for the work that you're doing there in helping out your fellow citizens in your country. It's deeply appreciated I'm sure. Thank you.

BS: Thank you so much.

CH: Bailey Suh is a critical care nurse who's been traveling to New York to help. We reached her in Hanover, Maryland.

[Music]

Barack Obama

CH: Some young people in Manitoba's criminal justice system aren't just in self-isolation right now, they're in solitary confinement in adult facilities. In an effort to keep COVID-19 out of provincial jails, officials have been isolating everyone who comes into custody for up to 14 days. That includes youth, some of whom have been held in segregation in adult cells at the Winnipeg Remand Centre. But now the provincial government has changed its policy after lawyers in the province raised concerns about treatment of young people in detention who are awaiting bail. Here's Hillary Tache, a legal aid lawyer who has three youth clients being held in adult detention.

[sc]

HILLARY TACHE: I am being told that the youths are spending 23 hours a day locked in a room. They are allowed out for one hour a day. During that hour, they shower and they may spend a bit of time at some tables that are sort of in a centre common area. But again, spending that time alone. Many of them have incredibly complex needs and come to the system with complex trauma and they're being offered no support as far as mental health, visiting with elders or just having adults to talk to in general. And I can't help but think that from the firsthand experiences that we're seeing in these early days, they are housing youths in ostensibly the same conditions as adults. Would we as a society be okay with 12 or 13 or 14 year old spending two weeks alone in an empty room for 23 hours a day with no adults to speak to and no mental health support? And I can't help but think that a lot of people are at home right now with teens due to the COVID-19 crisis. And how would their kids fare, not just without Internet, but without books, without stimulation for two weeks, being allowed out of their rooms for maybe an hour to shower? I fear that this would do irreparable harm to the strongest of our young people, let alone the children who are struggling.

[/sc]

CH: Hillary Tache is a lawyer with Regency Community Law Centre, a branch of Legal Aid, Manitoba. Three of her clients are young people who are being held in segregation in adult cells at the Winnipeg Remand Centre -- it's an effort to reduce the spread of COVID-19. Today, the province said it will no longer send young people into that adult centre. Instead, in a memo obtained by the CBC, the assistant deputy attorney general says youth who are admitted will be isolated in a separate cottage at the Manitoba Youth Centre. As we went to air, however, Ms. Tache believes her young clients were still in adult remand.

[Music]

Goldfish Stories: Grumpy & Hector

CH: I don't know about you, but I can't concentrate on much right now. It seems like the perfect time to read, say, Anna Karenina or something. But these days, I lose focus about three quarters of the way through a tweet. I have the attention span of a goldfish. But also the attention span for a goldfish -- two goldfish in fact. Both of them from the As It Happens archives. Starting with a story requested by Mary Hurley from Toronto. As I mentioned yesterday, she asked to hear guest host Linden MacIntyre's 1993 interview with Jesse Raynor of Portsmouth, England. Her paddlefish may have been inexpensive, but Ms. Rayner didn't believe its life was cheap.

LINDEN MACINTYRE: May I call you Jesse?

JESSE RAYNOR: By all means, you may.

LINDEN MACINTYRE: What happened to your goldfish?

JESSE RAYNOR: When I went to clean the bowl, I put fresh water in and cleaned the bowl, I noticed that Grumpy -- his name is Grumpy -- the goldfish with lying on his side at the bottom of the bowl. And I thought that straight away that he was dead -- done for. And his gills was motionless. He fins were barely moving. And he wasn't breathing. And I felt immediately that I wanted the goldfish to live because I have another goldfish. And if Grumpy had died then probably the other goldfish would too.

LINDEN MACINTYRE: And what did you do then, Jesse?

JESSE RAYNOR: On the spur of the moment, I simply thought of giving him the kiss of life. I took him out of the bowl gently in the palm of my hand. And with his face facing mine I just blew gently into his mouth a couple of times. Then I gently squeezed my fingers to get the heart motion going again. Put him on his own in a bowl, and put him under the cold water tap. Let the cold water run and the buoyancy of the water blasts a half of soluble aspirin and an oxtin tablet. Within half an hour, he was back to life fooling around again.

LINDEN MACINTYRE: Where did you learn to do this?

JESSE RAYNOR: Nowhere. It's just something that came to me.

LINDEN MACINTYRE: Have you ever given the kiss of life before?

JESSE RAYNOR: No. Never. To nothing. No animal, human or nothing. It's something I had to do, and I just got on and done it.

LINDEN MACINTYRE: Why do you think Grumpy keeled over in the first place?

JESSE RAYNOR: Well, I've been told things by various different vets. They all gave their own opinions that Grumpy was short of oxygen. Either that or he had something lodged in his gills. Anything like that. But they did say that it was dangerous to take him out of the bow -- out of the water.

LINDEN MACINTYRE: I would think so.

JESSE RAYNOR: That would have killed him, taking him out of the water. And they didn't agree with me putting aspirin in the water. The wrong thing to do.

LINDEN MACINTYRE: How has he been since this near-death experience?

JESSE RAYNOR: His is bright as a button. He's chasing the other fish already in the bowl.

LINDEN MACINTYRE: Has this changed him?

JESSE RAYNOR: In a way, yes, because before he was not very friendly. Both fish had different characters. One of the fish would come up to the top when I put my finger on the top of the water down. The other one wouldn't. One would come to the side of the bowl when I would put my finger on the side. The other one wouldn't. Grampy was the one that wouldn't. He always go below the water, went to the other side of the bowl. But now he does the same as the other one.

LINDEN MACINTYRE: How can you tell when a fish is grumpy?

JESSE RAYNOR: The attitude. He just wasn't very friendly. Every time I went near the bowl, he would go to the other side.

LINDEN MACINTYRE: And all that's changed now.

JESSE RAYNOR: All that's changed.

LINDEN MACINTYRE: Well, I hope you and Grumpy have a long and happy life together.

JESSE RAYNOR: Thank you very much.

LINDEN MACINTYRE: Thank you for talking to us.

JESSE RAYNOR: Thank you.

CH: From our archives, guest host Linden MacIntyre speaking with Jesse Raynor of Portsmouth, England, in August of 1993. Hector, the goldfish was a little hardier than Grumpy. When Michael Enright spoke with Hector's owner, Duncan Baird of St. John's, Newfoundland, and Labrador the fish had just turned 19-ish to Mr. Baird's apparent confusion and possibly even disappointment. Here's that interview from March 7th, 1988.

MICHAEL ENRIGHT: Hello, Mr. Baird. Many happy returns to Hector.

DUNCAN BAIRD: [Laughs] How did this story get you people?

MICHAEL ENRIGHT: Oh, we have our ways, Mr Baird. How is Hector feeling today on his birthday?

DUNCAN BAIRD: He seems to be quite good.

MICHAEL ENRIGHT: He is, eh.

DUNCAN BAIRD: Yeah.

MICHAEL ENRIGHT: And he's all of 19 years old.

DUNCAN BAIRD: Well, we're not too sure if he is 19 or 20. I got him when I was eleven or twelve. We're not positive.

MICHAEL ENRIGHT: Isn't that fantastic? Most of us, you know, who go to a pet store and buy a fish, we can't keep it alive for more than a week and a half.

DUNCAN BAIRD: No. That's the same way we are with most of our pets. But this one just seems to live and live.

MICHAEL ENRIGHT: What's your secret?

DUNCAN BAIRD: Well, I haven't done anything special with him, just feeding him twice a day. And he just seems to keep on going now. Unfortunately, in the last few months, he doesn't swim anymore and we have to feed him by hand.

MICHAEL ENRIGHT: How do you do that? You feed him by hand.

DUNCAN BAIRD: You put some fish food in your fingers and you put it in the tank with him. And he eats out of your hand.

MICHAEL ENRIGHT: Oh, the poor guy slowing down a bit, is he?

DUNCAN BAIRD: He is.

MICHAEL ENRIGHT: Do you put him in special water at all or?

DUNCAN BAIRD: No, just regular tap water. I suppose our Newfoundland water has something to be said for it.

MICHAEL ENRIGHT: I guess it does. Yeah. Well, we've known that for a long time. How did you start hand-feeding him? What prompted you to start?

DUNCAN BAIRD: About six months ago to tell you the truth he started floating like he was about to die. So we started putting our hand in and feeding him by hand.

MICHAEL ENRIGHT: You mean Hector was floating on the top of the water?

DUNCAN BAIRD: He just started to one day when we went home. That was about September. And since we've started feeding him by hand, he seems to be almost back to normal again now.

MICHAEL ENRIGHT: Can you explain what happened to him, was he just feeling poorly, I guess?

DUNCAN BAIRD: Well, it's true that he's been aging. He's gotten a bit of a kink in his tail. And I think it's just the age is starting to catch up to him.

MICHAEL ENRIGHT: He's got a kink in his tail.

DUNCAN BAIRD: He got a kink in his day now. We call it scoliosis.

MICHAEL ENRIGHT: Or scaly-iolsis maybe. His tail is a little bent, is it? Does he look like an old fish? Although I don't know what the heck an old fish looks like. I mean, it doesn't have whiskers. But can you tell he's kind of an old guy?

DUNCAN BAIRD: Yeah, I suppose you can tell just from his, you know, his scales and where he does have a kink in his tail makes him look a little bit older.

MICHAEL ENRIGHT: How big is is Hector?

DUNCAN BAIRD: Hecto is about -- with his tail -- about six inches long. Six and a half inches long.

MICHAEL ENRIGHT: Isn't that amazing? Do fish have an equivalency in years like dogs? I mean, are there fish years?

DUNCAN BAIRD: Well, not that I know of. My brother's a veterinarian and he's never mentioned anything like that.

MICHAEL ENRIGHT: So we don't know how long these kind of goldfish are expected to live.

DUNCAN BAIRD: No, I don't have an idea. You know, I've never heard of one living this long. You know, my friends always wonder how it's lived this long.

MICHAEL ENRIGHT: I've never heard of one either. You don't know what the life expectancy -- three, four years maybe?

DUNCAN BAIRD: Well, you know, from what I hear from other people, three or four years is pushing it even.

MICHAEL ENRIGHT: And Hector is maybe 20 years old.

DUNCAN BAIRD: Probably around 20 years old, and just keeps living, you know. And it's not like he's been treated super well. You know, sometimes he almost has to wear sneakers in the tank because there's that little water in there. And you know, our cat swings at gim just like anybody else's cat, you know? And, you know, he's been dropped on the floor. He's done everything that any other goldfish has done. But he just seems to keep living.

MICHAEL ENRIGHT: Are you going to do anything special today for him?

DUNCAN BAIRD: No, we don't have any plans for him as far as anything special is concerned. It's just a regular birthday for him.

MICHAEL ENRIGHT: Well, that's great. Give him our best.

DUNCAN BAIRD: Okay then.

MICHAEL ENRIGHT: Thanks for talking to us.

DUNCAN BAIRD: Thank you very much.

CH: From March 7th, 1988, that's Michael Enright speaking with Duncan Baird of St. John's, the bemused owner of Hector, the 19 or 20 year old goldfish. As we learned from both interviews, the key to staying alive as a goldfish is to keep doing one fairly simple thing: swimming.

[Music]

[sc]

JEANNIE ANGNATUK: The dog barking woke me up. It was around 4:30 in the morning. I tried to ignore the dogs because I thought there was nothing outside. They were going on for a good 10 minutes. So I checked the window in my room on the downstairs and I could see the back of the polar bear that was beside the shed. Then I walked to the living room, tried to wake up my husband who was sleeping on the couch. And he couldn't wake up for maybe two minutes. So I said "There's a polar bear!" So we checked again on the window in my room. It was gone. But when we checked again on the back door of the house -- I could see his face. It was so huge. And I tried to run, but I couldn't. It was standing on the ground trying to pull a polar bear skin on the stairs that he got a month ao. We couldn't open the door on the back door because it was too close for us. So we went up upstairs and he shot it from there. He shot it two more times and it's not far from our place.

JUANITA TAYLOR: Were you afraid this bear was going to break into your house?

JEANNIE ANGNATUK: Yeah because it was on the stairs in the back door -- a few feet away from me by the window.

JUANITA TAYLOR: And it took you a couple of minutes to wake up your husband. How were you trying to wake him up?

JEANNIE ANGNATUK: I tried to shake his body saying there's a polar bear. But he said no. But when I said it louder, he got up and we checked there it was on the stairs in the back door.

JUANITA TAYLOR: Have you ever been in a situation like this before, Jeannie?

JEANNIE ANGNATUK: Only in a cabin that my parents have -- it's 30 minutes by truck. It was springtime. My son saw his first one when he was 4 years old. But it was my first time being a few feet away from a real life polar bear.

JUANITA TAYLOR: These pictures are amazing. That bear looks huge. Do you know how tall it was?

JEANNIE ANGNATUK: My husband said it's about 10 feet. But when you stretch it, it may be a lot bigger.

JUANITA TAYLOR: That's a big bear. What's going to be done with the meat and the skin?

JEANNIE ANGNATUK: Some people got meat to give, some meat to his dog. He wanted me to make snow pants.

JUANITA TAYLOR: Jeannie is there anything you want to say to viewers at home about staying safe from bears?

JUANITA TAYLOR: Always check the windows if you go especially in the north.

[/sc]

CH: That was Jeannie Angnatuk speaking with CBC Northbeat host Juanita Taylor today about waking up to a polar bear trying to break into her home in Quaqtaq, Nunavik.

[Music]

Part 3: N.Y. doctor uses experience as Ebola patient to fight 'stunningly similar' COVID-19

New York Doc Ebola

Guest: Craig Spencer

CH: For a month now, Dr. Craig Spencer has been in the thick of the COVID-19 crisis at an E.R. in New York City. He thought that by now he'd be used to it -- treating patients day after day as they struggle to breathe and to survive. But he's not used to it. In The Washington Post, he writes, "When you wake up, you wonder, would they still call us heroes if they knew we felt so helpless?" That Helplessness recalls his own experience in 2014 as a patient in a New York City hospital when he was treated for Ebola. We reached Dr. Craig Spencer on his way to work in New York.

PC: Dr. Spencer, I know you're outside right now, but what does it sound like these days when you're working inside the emergency room?

CRAIG SPENCER: In the past few weeks, the sounds have really changed. It's gone from this cacophony of coughing, different types of coughs everywhere at all times to more of a silence caused by the silence of coughing but displacement by the monitors, the cardiac monitors that have these sirens that go off whenever anyone's heart rate goes too fast or their blood pressure dips or their oxygen goes down. So a lot of that coughing has been replaced by the sound of cardiac monitors.

PC: And why is it that that happened? Why has that changed?

CS: Well, what we're doing now is we're focusing on the most severe patients. So we're trying to get everyone that's really really sick, make sure that they're getting the care that they need. And many of them require a breathing tube, mechanical ventilation, and life support. And once you put someone on life support, you put a breathing tube in, well, it's impossible to cough anymore because you have that breathing tube in. So a lot of that noise and really those sounds that were so common a few weeks ago have been replaced.

PC: That must be quite eerie, even for someone like yourself who spent so many hours in an emergency room.

CS: Yeah, because everything that we're seeing right now is so different than what we normally see. This is not what we're used to. Our emergency rooms have become intensive care units. We have multiple people that are intubated, waiting for a room in the ICU if they're ever able to get one. I mean, we're just not sure if that's always going to be the case for everyone. We know that the numbers are declining, thankfully here, but you still see that the number of deaths is still continuing to remain really stubbornly high. And we expect that that will likely continue for some time.

PC: You have treated so many patients. Can you give me a sense of some of the people you've been treating? Some stories that stick with you?

CS: Yeah, I think for everyone the hardest stories have been the fact that we see so many patients who come in alone, there's no visitors that are allowed, we don't want to get them sick, and really we don't have the personal protective equipment to share with visitors as well. It's already pretty short in many hospitals all throughout the city and all throughout the country. And so a lot of people come in sick and they come in alone. So we've been having to call families on video and facetime to give them a couple of minutes to really speak to them and talk about what their wishes for care may be. And in some circumstances, families or patients have decided that they want to withdraw any life sustaining treatment or decided not to be put on ventilators. And so it's really tough to have those conversations and those moments with people who are really sick or with family members who are at home, you know, crying over the phone or over video. It's just something that we're really not used to and certainly not used to doing this often.

PC: In your experience as a medical professional, you have treated another very very deadly illness. You worked in West Africa a few years ago treating Ebola patients. Are there memories from that time that are paralleled in your and your current experience in New York?

CS: In comparison with Ebola in West Africa, what we're seeing here is stunningly similar. We see people reacting in many the same ways. Providers talking about how difficult it is to be in personal protective equipment for really long days, the physical exhaustion, as well as the mental exhaustion. But we also see from a social angle that is quite similar. We talked so much about the role of funerals and deaths in West Africa. And we're seeing here that there's a massive number of deaths every day in New York City. Morgues are full. We're having to think about new ways to honour our dead. And funerals are not being held in the same way that they used to. So, so much of what we saw and what we heard and what we learned in West Africa we're dealing with here again in New York City in 2020 with coronavirus.

PC: And you not only treated Ebola patients, you yourself were one of them. You were treated for Ebola in New York Hospital when he returned from Guinea. So you have this unique perspective of perhaps knowing what it's like to be a patient looking up at your care providers in full PPE, personal protective equipment. Give me a sense of what it's like from that perspective of a patient.

CS: It's almost impossible to describe. And I don't know that I possibly, you know, I really could. It's something that I know very tangibly. I remember it very well. Oh, this feeling of looking up at someone that's almost unrecognizable through their goggles and through their masks, trying to understand what they're saying through these thick masks or through these personal protective suits. It's very dehumanizing and it makes you feel toxic. And I can only imagine that this is how my patients feel right now. They must feel so sick and so disoriented, seeing providers and they look nothing like we normally do. For me, what I think it's done is it's given me a perspective that I try to share with my colleagues, the perspective that we need to have empathy in addition to our humanity and our traditional medical skills. We need to think about what it feels like for the people sitting in those chairs or sitting in those beds. It's really hard to do that if you haven't been in that place before. But I have. And I try to share those skills and that feedback and those lessons with my colleagues as much as I can.

PC: As a doctor, you have described feeling helpless right now. How is that weighing on you? How are you coping with that feeling of helplessness?

CS: In the same way that so many of us dealt with that in West Africa. We didn't know at that time what exactly helped. We tried to do everything we could, but resources were limited. And that was before there was a therapeutic drug, before there was a vaccine. Right now, we don't know what works. Our traditional tools, what we normally do for really sick patients don't seem to make much of a dent in the impact of their mortality for many people. So we're trying to do new things. We're talking to friends all over the city, friends all over the country in Italy and China, talking about proning patients so turning them on their belly, which helps with some people. Other therapeutic steps might help. But we just don't know. And that not knowing makes it so hard because we feel like a lot of time we just can't have the impact. And that's not what any of us are used to.

PC: Dr. Spencer, I know you're making your way to work hustling down Broadway and although you may feel helpless we also know you and people just like you on the frontlines of health care no matter if it's in the United States or elsewhere in the world, are doing so much to help. And we deeply appreciate it. Thank you very much.

CS: Thanks so much for having me and letting me share this story.

CH: Craig Spencer is the director of Global Health and Emergency Medicine at New York Presbyterian Columbia University Medical Center. He was in New York. And you can find more on his story on our webpage: cbc.ca/aih.

[Music]

Ideas Promo: Leanna Betasamosake Simpson

CH: On Ideas tonight after As It Happens, Leanna Betasamosake Simpson -- Indigenous scholar, writer and artist tells stories that illuminate the philosophies and ethics undergirding Anishinaabe worlds. She spoke in March of the Canadian Literature Centre's Kreisel Lecture series at the University of Alberta.

LEANNE BETASAMOSAKE SIMPSON: My ancestors woke up each morning and created an Anishinaabe world. They animated their political system of governance and diplomacy. They built their collective philosophical and ethical understandings. They made processes for solving conflicts and reestablishing balance. And they built their economy with the consent of plant and animal nations. They built, maintained, and nurtured systems for sharing knowledge and taking care of each other. They worked collectively to produce, reproduce, replicate, amplify and share Indigenous life because if they did not Anishinaabe worlds wouldn't exist. They were makers. They got up each morning and they worked hard. Not the white man wage labour Monday to Friday 9 to 5 kind of work. Not the kind of work where you outsource the labour of living so you can do something more important. But the kind of work that values above all else the way one lives.

CH: That was Leanna Betasamosake Simpson, talking about Anishinaabe philosophies and ethics at the 2020 Kreisel lecture in Edmonton this past March. And you can hear more on Ideas tonight right after As It Happens.

[Music]

Bug Alert

CH: The first few weeks were fine. But now that you've tried making sour dough bread, tried macramé and gave up and rewatched every episode of The Office, you may be getting a bit stir crazy. Quarantine can be lonely. The good news is, even if you feel alone, you're not actually alone. Right now, you have a whole enormous family of friendly housemates you've never met. The bad news is, once you know about the company you unknowingly keep, you might feel a bit squeamish, but we thought we'd remind you anyway. In 2016, Carol spoke with entomologist Michelle Trautwein, who had just completed a study that found the average house is teeming with hundreds of spiders, bugs, and other multi-limbed creatures. From our archives, here's part of their conversation is chat.

CO: Ms. Trautwein, what do you think about all those bugs living in houses?

MICHELLE TRAUTWEIN: I love it. I'm super excited about it. [Laughs]

CO: Well, what exactly did you find and what kind of bugs? These are arthropods, right?

MICHELLE TRAUTWEIN: Arthropods -- so insects and their relatives. Insects, which we all know, but then also spiders, centipedes, millipedes, other kinds of creepy crawly things with exoskeletons and a lot of legs.

CO: So what did you find?

MICHELLE TRAUTWEIN: Well, the first thing we found was just a ton of diversity. On average, houses had about 100 arthropod species that ranged up to well over 200 species. And that was really exciting for us.

CO: Now, are these dirty houses? Are these in apartment buildings? What kinds of houses did you look at?

MICHELLE TRAUTWEIN: We only sampled freestanding houses, so we didn't look at apartments. Some were clean, some were dirty, but all of them had bugs.

CO: But you found about 580 different types of arthropods.

MICHELLE TRAUTWEIN: That's right.

CO: I mean, are they dangerous to people?

MICHELLE TRAUTWEIN: No. So the vast majority of things that are living in our houses are completely benign. You know, I like to consider them friendly roommates. A lot of them don't actually live and thrive and breed and eat in your house. Some of them just kind of come in -- I think of them as ill fated tourists. You know, they come in looking for something and they have no way to eat so they die on your windowsill. Many of these things are very small. You wouldn't even be able to find them if you were looking for them. That's how tiny a lot of them are.

CO: You say they're unfortunate tourists who have wandered into the wrong place. But are some of them living there the whole time who've never been outside?

MICHELLE TRAUTWEIN: Absolutely. For example, one of the groups that we found in almost every house are these tiny little insects called Book Lice, which became my very favourite kind of like house mascot by the end of the study. They're about the size of a speck of dust -- so tiny. And they just mill around, you know, the corners of your house and eat organic debris. And they're actually close relatives of head lice that, you know, we all try to avoid getting as kids in elementary school. Yet these are, you know, kind of like the friendly cousins of head lice I'd like to say. They're just adorable, tiny little specks that we're all living with.

CO: But they're called book lice. So are they in our books?

MICHELLE TRAUTWEIN: Well, you know, they are found in books. I think they either eat, you know, some people say the glue in books. I've heard other people say the fungus that grows in my books. Now, the truth is, when we sampled houses, we never went through anyone's books. So we found the book lice more just, you know, running along baseboards and on windowsills and things like that.

CO: And there was this little tiny wasp you found you.

MICHELLE TRAUTWEIN: So that's another really exciting thing when you think about your house is that there's a lot of amazing life history happening. And one of those fascinating things is that there's all these parasites. It's a tiny little parasitic wasps that, for example, are parasitizing, you know, roach egg cases or flies that live in your house. So there's a lot of really fascinating biology happening.

CO: So we just don't have bugs -- we have dead bugs and things are living on the dead bugs.

MICHELLE TRAUTWEIN: Well, things are living on the live bugs as well. [Laughter]

CO: The spiders, for instance.

MICHELLE TRAUTWEIN: Spiders and centipedes. I don't know if you've seen a house centipede, but that's a magnificent creature -- it's kind of like a top predator. And so, yeah, there's a whole system.

CO: The centipedes are the ones that suddenly show up in your bathtub.

MICHELLE TRAUTWEIN: Sometimes, yep. Centipedes will do that along with dragonflies and silverfish, all kinds of good things in the bathtub.

CO: Did you go down into the drains or were these just things that show up sort of around the drain?

MICHELLE TRAUTWEIN: Oh yeah. No. They would just show up. And that's another thing, the estimate of diversity that we got was probably pretty low because again, we didn't go digging through drawers or in drains or anything like that. And certainly those places are harboring even more secret diversity.

CO: All right. The telephone pole beetle.

MICHELLE TRAUTWEIN: Yes. A rare group of beetles that as entomologists we hadn't seen in the wild before. And so the fact that we had found them in houses was bizarre and interesting.

CO: How many different kinds of ants did you find?

MICHELLE TRAUTWEIN: Many. But there's a lot of ant diversity in houses. So we found ants in virtually every house we've sampled. And I can say that that's something that we've seen all over the place. We've expanded the study to be a global study. And ants are in humans houses. That's universal.

CO: Is there any kind of ecological balance in all this? I mean, the fact that there's spiders, spiders are eating the flies and the flies are eating something else. Does it all kind of balance itself out?

MICHELLE TRAUTWEIN: Well, that's an interesting question that we want to look into, and so we're thinking about the endures as this kind of a new and relatively unexplored ecosystem that we know very little about. And so that's something we're going to spend some more time looking into, because you're right. There's predators and there's parasites. And there's obviously a lot of things getting eaten and eating in your house.

CH: From 2016, Carol speaking with Michelle Trautwein, an entomologist who has studied the multitudes of insects that live in our homes.

[Music]

Old Apple Varieties

Guest: EJ Brandt

CH: When EJ Brandt goes apple picking, he doesn't just grab a beat up bushel basket. He arms himself with a GPS, plastic bands, and zippered bags. And when he finds an apple that's ripe for the picking, he does not make it into a pie. Mr. Brandt is kind of like an apple detective. For the past four years, he and David Benscoter have searched for and collected apples from across the Pacific Northwest in hopes of rediscovering types that were thought to be extinct. And the two men recently learned that last year's fall excursions were their most fruitful. We reached EJ Brandt in Troy, Idaho.

PC: EJ how many of these long lost apple varieties have you been able to find during this past year?

EJ BRANDT: Well, this past year we located 10 lost varieties and a couple of them in there were thought to be totally extinct, just gone forever.

PC: So how does that compare to the past four years that you've been doing? Is 10 a lot?

EJ BRANDT: Ten is an extraordinary number. If we get one or two apples a year, we consider ourselves very lucky. But this was an extraordinary year.

PC: And how does all this detective work work? How are you finding these apples?

EJ BRANDT: Oh, most of them people make contacts with this through either Facebook, the webpage, emails, word of mouth, and they say, well, my great great grandfather had this property and we're still living on it -- would you be able to examine it? And then we also go to the historical societies. We look up to where some of the old homesteads were and we make a trip there. And if we get lucky, we can find some apples there and send them in for identification.

PC: And how are they identified? Who identifies them?

EJ BRANDT: Okay. What they are is the Temperate Orchard Conservancy in Molalla, Oregon. They've been doing this for well over 40 years and they have a vast resources of old USDA watercolours and other sources that they can slice these apples, look at them, look at the colouration, the skin, the stems, and they can identify these apples, if they have been of a loss variety.

PC: And so in this year's findings, the 10 varieties that you find, were any sort of those big eureka moments, like something that had been lost for so long?

EJ BRANDT: Yes. One of them was the Sary Sinap. And it was developed in Turkey in the very early 1700s. And this apple just disappeared somewhere around 1898-1899. And no one heard of this apple. And a friend of mine had a piece of property here just out where I live. And he asked me to look at this apple tree. And within 72 hours, the apple identifiers got back to me and they were just super excited. And they said this apple has been lost for some 130 years.

PC: I have to ask, when you come across that tree or others that you find and pluck down the apple, aren't you just tempted to take a little taste?

EJ BRANDT: Oh, that's the first thing that we do. That's the exact first thing that we do is take a taste test. And if that apple is edible, it has good flavour, good texture, we know that it's a well-established type of apple. So then we can take a sample from it.

PC: Okay. And so when you bit this year into that apple that had come from Turkey all those years ago, tell me about that moment.

EJ BRANDT: Oh, it was just absolutely fabulous. WIt had a good colouration and a good shape to this apple. And since it was an early summer apple, the early summer apples are extremely rare. So I knew I had something special here. When I bit into this apple, I go, oh, my word, this is absolutely delicious, particularly because of the colouration and the shape of it I knew I had something unique.

PC: This sounds like a pretty good gig, my friend.

EJ BRANDT: It is. [Laughter] We eat a lot of apples. It is my type of work.

PC: It takes some time to actually confirm that these apples are in fact, one of the thousands that are currently lost. You said this one only took 72 hours, but sometimes it takes a lot longer. Once you have that information, what's next for these trees?

EJ BRANDT: Okay. Once I have this information, then I know that the scion wood has to be cut in the winter months. The scion wood is the new wood growth that grows vertically from the trees when the tree is dormant during the winter months. That's when we have to get in there, cut the scion wood, bag it in little Ziploc bags with a wet paper towel. And we have to keep it refrigerated until the month of April when the wood is actually trying to wake up. The scion wood has the exact same DNA codes as the parent tree. The seeds from that apple do not have the exact DNA code. And they will not produce the same apple. So after that in April, we take rootstock. We graph that scion wood onto the rootstock to form a brand new tree again.

PC: EJ you clearly love apples, you love eating them, you love looking for them. At the heart of all this, why do you do this?

EJ BRANDT: The main purpose, what I'm doing right here is to make sure what our forefathers planted, they enjoyed, they worked hard for, they sweated over that to make sure that is never lost again.

PC: Here is a very controversial one for you, if I can put it that way. There's much debate over this, EJ, but what is your favourite apple?

EJ BRANDT: Oh, my favourite apple. One of my favourite apples is the Givens. And it was also thought to be extinct. And it was in an extreme remote location. It is a very large apple, it has a good crisp texture to it, and has just the right amount of tartness, sweetness. And it makes fabulous pies. It's a good eating apple. It's an all around perfect apple for everything.

PC: EJ thank you for talking to us today. I appreciate it very much.

EJ BRANDT: No problem. I'm glad to help out.

CH: EJ Brandt is the co-founder of the Lost Apple Project. We reached him in Troy, Idaho.

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April 16, 2020 Episode Transcript

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