Explain to us, remind us what's going to be happening actually this week in this very complicated story.

Yeah, so this is something pretty extraordinary.

In 20, 25 years of doing reporting, spent a lot of time in courts, never actually covered a hearing like this before.

It's a contempt trial for Children's Hospital in a civil lawsuit that, as you mentioned, families and patients who had been receiving gender affirming care at Children's Hospital, and then that care was stopped due to some threats from the Trump administration and Children's worrying about the potential sort of retaliation, negative consequences for the hospital.

If it continued the care, so it suspended the care, the patient sued saying that that is discriminatory under state law.

There was a proceeding in the trial court that then went up to the Supreme Court, and the state Supreme Court found that there is sufficient evidence that children did end up violating the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act by suspending this care.

essentially saying, you know, but for these patients being transgender, you would be continuing this care.

And again, Children's is also trying to make people understand that, hey, you got to understand what we have at risk here, that if the federal government is leaning this hard on us, they have the purse strings on things like Medicaid and other grants, and that we may not survive financially if the federal government continue to crack down on us because they hate transgender care and are trying to end it everywhere.

Are they more worried about current state of health at the facility with guards coming in and out and potential cases still there? Or are they more worried about setting a precedent for the future and the relationships between a private entity and a federal entity and local rules about public health, all of the above? What are the main concerns?

Yeah, I would say it's both.

And you raise a really good point, which is it's really easy to think of a disease that somebody who's a detainee at the facility has.

It's easy to think of like, well, that's contained.

It's contained within the facility, but that's not the way these things work, right? People get released from the facility.

And as you mentioned, there are There are people who work there, hundreds of people who work at this facility who come and go, come back into the community.

And so there's a potential for people to be carrying tuberculosis outside and into the surrounding community.

And thus state lawsuits.

Why don't you tell us what is the latest on that?

Yeah, so this has really been an extraordinary kind of heartbreaking story to report on.

It has to do with families who have kids who are transgender and who are seeking gender-affirming care at Children's Hospital.

And the caveat we always say that in this case, we're basically talking about prescriptions.

We're talking about prescriptions for hormones.

We're talking about prescriptions for puberty blockers.

We're talking about essentially medications that allow...

How long, do we know when there would be a trial and how long this might take to play out?

Hmm

... to think about them moving in that way, right? One person gets it, then another person gets it, then another person gets it.

And so I really wanted to look in to understand, well, why is it coming here? And the truth is that that's just not the way that this disease moves.

So typically, this is a foodborne illness that, that occurs, and it occurs because the parasite hitches a ride on, uh, infected produce that's infected, uh, at the, the point of, uh, cultivation, right in the field, in the processing facility.

And so it only spreads to the extent that that contaminated produce spreads, and if that produce isn't here, it's not gonna be spreading to Colorado.

So it was something I really wanted to try to understand.

And what I did hear from the state health department is that we do not have evidence in Colorado that there is produce that is unsafe to eat in the grocery stores.

[laughs]

And we keep seeing some of our favorite meteorologists tweeting out that we have, if not the worst air, some of the worst air in the world right now.

Yeah, so air quality in cities across the globe will kind of go up and go down throughout the day.

So where your ranking is depends on the time of day it is for you and everybody else.

But there's a site called IQair.com. that ranks air quality for cities around the globe.

Denver currently has the worst air quality in the country by some measure and is ranked 11th for worst air quality in the world.

Up there currently, and we're recording this about 140 on Tuesday, currently up there with Karachi, Pakistan, Israel, Jerusalem, Mexico City, Milan, Italy, and some other cities.

What should we be telling people? What are doctors telling people who are checking in about their recurring breathing problems and how this has exacerbated it?

Yeah, absolutely.

So don't buy up our entire supply.

Yeah.

So understandably, the Canadian government does not want to see its own supply of drugs diluted or diminished.

And so they have said that they will not allow exports of their drugs into the United States unless they will not allow export if there is a shortage of those drugs in Canada.

So they're saying if we already don't have enough of them, you can't take them and move them into the United States.

That seems to be maybe a surmountable hurdle.

You need to find places and find drugs that there's not a shortage of.

Couldn't the U.S. drug manufacturers lower their prices in the U.S.?

So what's the latest?

Yeah, absolutely.

And I'll, I'll just say, Mike, you know, um, as somebody who reports on this kind of stuff a lot and tries really hard to understand pharmaceutical pricing and why they cost what they cost, uh, it was really, really heartening to sit in a courtroom with a very smart judge and hear him say that he doesn't understand it either.

So I was, I was just super psyched to be among, uh, a, a good company there.

So this case has to do with something that is called the Colorado Prescription Drug Affordability Board.

This is something that, uh, lawmakers created, uh, way back in 2021, and the goal here is to create this board that has the authority to look at broadly all the prices of prescription drugs in Colorado, identify which ones that it considers to be unaffordable, and then it can potentially, if it goes through all the right steps, it can, uh, assign what is called an upper payment limit or effectively a price cap on this drug.

It, it will, will cap the price of what any patient or, uh, end payer, so that could include, uh, an insurance company, will have to pay for the drug.

So that's why they're willing to spend a lot of money on a lot of lawyers for a long time on this precedent-setting case.

You're right

... uh, city.

Uh, went on a, a tour of the Arctic, hit some, uh, very remote, uh, islands in the South Atlantic, um, and then people started testing positive for hantavirus.

Now, we think of hantavirus here in Colorado as being something that's spread through mouse poop and mouse pee and potentially through, uh, contact with, with live mice.

But, uh, in this case, it appeared that the virus was spreading, uh, person to person, so it raised a, a lot of concerns.

Uh, certainly, uh, had some, uh, eerie kind of like early COVID omens that, that people were picking up on.

The ship was kind of docked, uh, bobbing off the coast of Africa for a while and then ended up going to the Canary Islands, where everybody was disembarked and sent on home.

And then this cruise ship consequence is really kind of, you mentioned this in the story as well, they're dumping parachutes of treatment and people, uh, to do the treatment in these remote islands.