SUFFOLK ClOSEUP : Dr. Berger And Lyme disease

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

A medical pioneer in Suffolk County in identifying, treating and also speaking out about the gravity of Lyme disease and its spread died this month.

Dr. Bernard Berger, a dermatologist who passed away at 85, wrote early journal articles in the 1980s on the identification of Lyme disease and its treatment with antibiotics. And he was highly critical of the lack of urgency the Suffolk County Department of Health Services took toward the disease. 

“I absolutely believe we’re approaching an epidemic,” Dr. Berger was quoted as telling The New York Times in 1987 in an article it published headlined “Tick-Borne Disease Infects Suffolk.” Said Dr. Berger: “There are certain areas like Montauk, Shelter Island and North Haven where it’s not unusual to have at least one member of the family contract Lyme disease.”

Dr. Berger was a “go-to” medical person when I wrote early on about Lyme disease.

As to the insufficient interest in Lyme disease by the Suffolk County Department of Health Services, in this column in 1987 I noted that the New York State Department of Health had just described Lyme disease as “endemic” in Suffolk and said the county was the worst area for Lyme disease in the state.

I related that Suffolk County health commissioner, Dr. David Harris, asserted that Lyme disease must take “its place besides other diseases in the county” and holding that it was “treatable.”

That’s 35 years ago, and in retrospect it should be acknowledged that Dr. Harris, and under him the county Department of Health Services, was vigorous then in efforts at dealing with AIDS. AIDS was striking the New York area—and Suffolk—hard in the early 1980s. And unlike many areas of the nation where, amid the homophobia of the time, strong action wasn’t taken, the Suffolk health department was moving robustly, even though the miraculous “cocktail” drugs for AIDS were yet to become available.

But, no question, on Lyme disease, strong action by the Suffolk agency was lacking. Indeed, Suffolk County Legislator John Foley of Blue Point, long chairman of the legislature’s Health Committee, felt compelled to put forth a resolution directing the Department of Health Services to develop an action plan because, as Foley said, its actions had not “been strong enough.”

Meanwhile, Dr. Berger, out of his office in Southampton, was treating hundreds upon hundreds of Lyme disease victims, conducting research and speaking out.

He retired in 2018 noting that when “I opened my practice in 1971, with my pregnant wife serving as secretary and nurse, I was the only dermatologist on the South Fork,” and that he planned to remain active in sports. He was a passionate athlete who competed in triathlons and running events, loved tennis and sculling. 

He was diagnosed that year with Amyloidoisis, a disease that causes failure of organs such as the heart and kidneys. He died at home in East Hampton surrounded by his family and friends. Dr. Berger and his wife of 52 years, Phyllis, had three children.

Dr. Berger also had an extensive military career. This included serving in the Army as a captain with service at an Army hospital. Discharged in 1968, he went back to the military in 1975 joining the Air Force and was chief of hospital services at a U.S. base in Japan. He continued in the Army Reserve retiring with the rank of colonel.

Will the kind of miracle drugs developed for AIDS ever come about for Lyme disease? There’s work going on now on a vaccine to provide immunization based on mRNA, also used in the vaccines advanced for COVID-19.  It is being developed by Valneva, a vaccine company in France, along with New York-headquartered Pfizer—a name so familiar to us these days for its COVID vaccine. 

In a press release on April 26—the week before, on May 7, Dr. Berger died—Valneva and Pfizer said it’s “the only Lyme disease vaccine candidate currently in clinical development.” As to Lyme disease, the companies stated: “While the true incidence of Lyme disease is unknown, it is estimated to annually affect approximately 476,000 people in the United States and 130,000 people in Europe. Early symptoms…are often overlooked. Left untreated, the disease can disseminate and cause more serious complications affecting the joints, the heart or the nervous system. The medical need for vaccination against Lyme disease is steadily increasing as the geographic footprint of the disease widens.”

Dr. Berger warned us decades ago about that widening. 

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books. 

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP : Suffolk County's History Includes The Fight For Abortion

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

A decision by the U.S. Supreme Court involving a longtime Suffolk County person—Bill Baird—was at the base of its subsequent Roe v. Wade decision which legalized abortion in the United States. Now, Roe v. Wade is likely to be overturned by a court majority. A draft opinion leaked to Politico written by Justice Samuel Alioto sets the stage for it.

And Baird, long a resident of Centerport in Huntington Town, who after death threats and the firebombing of one of his birth control/abortion clinics on Long Island has lived in another state, was expressing his outrage to me last week.

The three Trump nominees to the Supreme Court—Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett—should, said Baird, be “removed from office” for testifying that Roe v. Wade was established precedent when they underwent confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee. “They lied,” said Baird. “All they wanted to do was to get into office and prevent women from getting abortions.”

Baird began battling for legalized abortion after, in 1963, as the clinical director of EMKO, a manufacturer of birth control products, he was at Harlem Hospital “coordinating research, and “I heard the scream of a young African-American woman covered with blood” from the waist down. She was bleeding caused by “a piece of coat hanger” used in a self-inflicted abortion. The unmarried woman, who already had nine children, “died in my arms.”

He was to establish the Parents Aid Society, and later the Pro-Choice League, and be jailed eight times in five states for advocating birth control and legal abortion.

In 1967, students at Boston University sent Baird a petition asking him to challenge the Massachusetts’ “Crimes Against Chastity, Decency, Morality and Good Order” law. He gave a presentation at the university attended by 1,500 students in which he gave a female student a condom and a package of contraceptive foam. Police immediately “swooped in” and he was arrested as a felon, convicted and sentenced to three months in jail.

Thomas Eisenstadt was to become the sheriff of another Suffolk County—Suffolk County, Massachusetts—so Baird’s challenge of the Massachusetts law was titled Baird v. Eisenstadt. In 1972, Supreme Court Justice John J. Brennan, Jr. wrote the decision in that case stating it was legal for an unmarried person to be provided contraception. It declared: “If the right of privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as to whether to bear or beget a child.”

That decision—and its emphasis on the “right of privacy”—would be the basis the following year for the Roe v. Wade decision in which the Supreme Court ruled it was legal for a woman to have an abortion.

Other arrests of Baird included one in Huntington in 1971 at a presentation attended by 300 people, he related. He showed a birth control pill and a diaphragm, and on the basis of a mother being in the audience who was “holding a 14-month baby,” he was “handcuffed” by the Suffolk County Police Department, “spent the night in jail” and charged along with the infant’s mother with “endangering the welfare of a child.”

There would be other legal challenges including two more cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. Further, Baird “every year for 30 years” went to an anti-abortion gathering called the “National Right to Life Convention”—he says the term “right to life” was devised as part of the anti-abortion PR strategy post-Roe v. Wade. At the conventions he conducted a “dangerous noontime picket” bearing a cross written on it “Free Women From The Cross of Oppression.” 

His clinics, in Hauppauge and Hempstead—the Hempstead clinic was struck by a man who barged into the waiting room wielding a firebomb in 1979—are now gone. But Baird, who will be 90 next month, keeps going. He urges people to translate their support for legal abortion in elections this and coming years making sure “they choose candidates who support a women’s rights to make their own decisions,” and to otherwise take action.

“Bill is tireless and amazing and still out there,” says Marilyn Fitterman of East Hampton, former president of the National Organization for Women–New York State, a grandmother of nine who has worked with Baird for decades and authored the recent book “Why I Marched” Moreover, she warned last week: “If the right for reproductive freedom falls, other things are also going to fall.” 

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books. 

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP: Redistricting "They Did It Because They Thought They Could"

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

They did it because they could. And now New York State’s highest court said they shouldn’t have.

With Democratic majorities in both the State Assembly and State Senate, a redistricting plan—a map giving Democratic candidates an advantage in districts throughout the state and notably Long Island—was passed. And Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul signed off on it.

But last month, the state’s highest court, its Court of Appeals, by a 4-3 vote, rejected the plan. The court’s majority held that it was “substantially unconstitutional.” The mapping of Congressional districts in particularly was “drawn with impermissible partisan purpose.”

A “special court master”—Jonathan Cervas with the Institute for Politics and Strategy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania and an expert on redistricting—will redraw the map.

The plan by the Democratic majorities in the State Legislature was an extreme case of gerrymandering—the word coined for the redistricting done in 1812 under Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry with the “mander” for salamander—what one Massachusetts Senate district looked like. 

The New York plan involved multiple salamander-shaped districts.

For example, Suffolk’s lst Congressional District which long consisted of the five East End towns, all of Brookhaven and most of Smithtown, was to have GOP-leaning areas between Westhampton and East Quogue in Southampton eliminated. Left of Brookhaven would be only its northern half which has a substantial Democratic presence. Smithtown would be cherry-picked and include Democratic-inclined Commack. The district would then extend west into Islip and pull in heavily Democratic Brentwood, Central Islip and North Bay Shore. Further west it would take in the northern portion of Babylon Town, which votes reliably Democrat, and a southern part Huntington including Democratic-voting Dix Hills. Going yet further west, the lst C.D. would extent into the Democratic bastions of Plainview and Bethpage—in Nassau County. 

“Preservation of communities of interest” is considered important when it comes to redistricting which is done to reflect population changes after the national census every decade. 

But in the New York plan, in the lst C.D. and other districts, communities were combined not to represent common interests but for Democratic political advantage.

Gerrymandering based on the 2020 census wasn’t just a New York Democratic move but happened elsewhere in the U.S. and involved both Democratic and Republican Parties.  

The media watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Media features an article exploring this in the current issue of its monthly newsletter Extra! The piece, by Dorothee Benz, quoted USA Today as connecting gerrymandering to “increasing polarization,” “gridlock,” and “an even more divisive Congress.” It cited the concern of The New York Times about gerrymandering causing a “lack of competition in general elections” which “can widen the ideological gulf between parties.”

This is because of “uncompetitive districts—that is, one-party districts,” wrote Benz. 

She reported that “the percentage of competitive districts in Congress is set to shrink from an already appalling 17% after the 2010 redistricting to a truly deplorable 9% after the 2020 redistricting.” She quoted USA Today stating uncompetitive districts are “driving the lack of action on issues that a lot of Americans really care about.”

Other recent gerrymandered redistricting moves, she noted, included in Ohio where Republicans “redrew congressional maps in a way that turned 64% of them into safe Republican districts.” That plan was struck down by the Supreme Court of Ohio.

In New York, the gerrymandering and its judicial rejection will necessitate having two primaries—one in June, one in August—at a multi-million-dollar additional cost.  

There are a number of organizations that have long sought reform in redistricting. A leader in New York has been its League of Women Voters which entered a “friend of the court” brief in the challenge to the state plan. It declared: “This appeal raises a question of monumental importance: whether the courts will enforce the procedural requirements adopted by the people in the New York Constitution to prevent partisan gerrymandering…”

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books. 

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP - Climate Change "The Jury Has Reached A Verdict"

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

“The jury has reached a verdict. And it is damning,” declared UN Secretary-General António Guterres after the recent issuance at the UN of the third Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. The report “is a litany of broken climate promises. It is a file of shame, cataloguing the empty pledges that put us firmly on track towards an unlivable world,” he said.

“We are on a fast track to climate disaster,” continued Guterres.

Guterres went on: “Major cities under water. Unprecedented heatwaves. Terrifying storms. Widespread water shortages. The extinction of a million species of plants and animals.  This is not fiction or exaggeration. It is what science tells us will result from our current energy policies.”

“We are on a pathway to global warming of more than double the 1.5° Centigrade [2.7 degrees Fahrenheit] limit agreed in Paris [at the UN Climate Change Conference there in 2015]. Some government and business leaders are saying one thing, but doing another. Simply put, they are lying,” said Guterres. “And the results will be catastrophic. This is a climate emergency.”

Guterres, who became the UN’s top official as secretary-general in 2017, is former prime minister of Portugal. Earlier, for 17 years he was a member of the Portugese Parliament. He’s an experienced international diplomat, for a decade the UN’s high commissioner for refugees.

The UN report came as a parallel report was issued by a grouping of U.S. government agencies led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It, too, presented a damning picture. Among other things, “Sea level rise will create a profound shift in coastal flooding over the next 30 years by causing tide and storm surge heights to increase and reach further inland. In addition to the rise caused by “emissions to date,” “Failing to curb future [greenhouse gas] emissions could cause a rise of up to “7 feet by the end of this century.”

The UN report was issued and the presentation by Guterres made at the UN in New York —across the East River from Long Island, among the ground zeroes for climate change impacts.

In Suffolk County, announced recently was a $1 million plan for county projects to “counter the impact of stronger storms and increasing flooding resulting from climate change,” as Newsday described it. “Projects could include beach nourishment, wetlands restoration and open space acquisition,” said Newsday, summing up the plan. County Executive Steve Bellone said: “This is all of us stepping forward to say that we have to aggressively address coastal resiliency.”

The reaction of Kevin McAllister, president of the Sag Harbor-based organization Defend H20—who has been in the forefront in Suffolk in speaking out about climate change and what is being done and not being done—says of the plan: “Open space acquisition, particularly with coastal lands, is a meaningful endeavor in response to a rapidly rising sea. Wetland restoration is, of course, important but let’s be clear, expanding and revegetating wetlands is very different from dredging new ponds for mosquito reduction, the current county priority, which is, in fact, contrary to the absorption of floodwaters. As to so-called beach nourishment, this is a strategy that is both environmentally and economically unsustainable and that only delays and makes more costly what really needs to happen—moving back from the edge and out of harm’s way.”

Published last week was an article titled “Climate Adaptation Is Going To Be A Disaster” by Andrew Dessler, professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University and co-author of the book The Science and Politics of Global Climate Change. He wrote that “reducing our emissions of greenhouse gases by switching from fossil fuels to climate-safe renewables is the easier way to deal with climate change. Wind and solar energy are now the cheapest energy sources…” 

Getting at the cause of climate change—mainly the burning of fossil fuel: coal, oil and gas—and not simply dealing with its effect, is key. That’s completely possible technically. The resistance is from vested interests: the coal, oil and gas industries, and their political clout.

Published in 2020 was 100% Clean, Renewable Energy and Storage for Everything, a book by Mark Z. Jacobson, director of the Atmosphere/Energy Program and professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University. It details the huge potentials of “WWS”—“Wind-Water-Solar”—through onshore and offshore wind, wave and tidal power, solar photovoltaic and concentrated solar power and other green energy sources. Green energy is the way out of the looming climate disaster. Dr. Jacobson is also a co-founder of the aptly named The Solutions Project.

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books. 

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP: Climate Change

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

Long Island—this island jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean—is among the most vulnerable places in the United States to be impacted by rising sea levels caused by climate change. 

As a recent U.S. government multi-agency report states: “Sea level rise will create a profound shift in coastal flooding over the next 30 years by causing tide and storm surge heights to increase and reach further inland. By 2050, ‘moderate’ (typically damaging) flooding is expected to occur, on average, more than 10 times as often as it does today, and can be intensified by local factors.”

The report, by a group of agencies led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), says “sea level along the U.S. coastline is projected to rise, on average, 10-12 inches…in the next 30 years…which will be as much as the rise measured over the last 100 years.” The greatest rises are predicted in the report to happen on the East and Gulf Coasts.

And, the report notes, even if the world can slash the burning of fossil fuels—coal, oil and gas and their emissions—the main reason for climate change, seas will continue to rise through 2050 due to the global warming that has already been caused. 

Sea level rise by 2100 “because of emissions to date” could be “about two feet.” And, “Failing to curb future emissions could cause an additional 1.5-5 feet of rise for a total of 3.5-7 feet by the end of this century,” it says. The uncertainty about the range is because of questions about how the world’s largest ice sheets will respond to rises in temperature.

Melting ice sheets add more water to the world’s oceans. 

The U.S. government study was issued in February. On March 25 the Associated Press reported: “An ice shelf the size of New York City has collapsed in East Antarctica, an area long thought to be stable and not hit much by climate change, concerned scientists said.” 

Exactly a week before, the headline of an article in The Washington Post was: “It’s 70 degrees warmer than normal in eastern Antarctica. Scientists are flabbergasted.”

And earlier that week, the headline of another piece in The Washington Post was: “Record ‘bomb cyclone’ bringing exceptional warmth to North Pole.” The sub-head: “Arctic temperatures could approach the melting point as they surge nearly 50 degrees above normal.” What’s being termed a “bomb cyclone” is a low-pressure storm that intensifies at breakneck speed and has been attributed to global warming. 

Kevin McAllister, president of the Sag Harbor-based organization Defend H20, who has been in the forefront in Suffolk in speaking out about climate change and what is being done—and not being done—here, says of the U.S. government report: “It is based on the most current science and further evidence of the urgency to act. On a global scale it means drastically curtailing fossil fuel emissions. And on a local scale it’s rethinking the current approach to rapidly rising waters— costly sand replenishment of perpetually eroding beaches and allowing the hard armoring of irreplaceable shorelines, both of which are environmentally and economically unsustainable practices…For the more vulnerable areas, the appropriate response is to move out of harm’s way. Our elected officials need to come to terms with the inevitable changes before it’s too late.”

Or, as Jeff Peterson, retired senior policy advisor at the Environmental Protection Agency and author of the book A New Coast: Strategies for Responding to Devastating Storms and Rising Seas wrote this month on the The Hill website out of Washington, D.C.: “Today, the accepted response strategy is to hold the shoreline right where it is by building seawalls or adding sand to beaches. On the other hand, sea level rise is coming at a scale that will eventually defeat such interim protection measures. In most places, a durable solution requires stepping back from the coast, gradually relocating homes and other assets to make room for the ocean.”

This month the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the United Nations, composed of 278 experts from all over the world, issued its newest report on climate change which stated, “The cumulative scientific evidence is unequivocal: Climate change is a threat to human well-being and planetary health.” 

That next week.

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books.