60 Minutes (1968) s46e32 Episode Script
Season 46, Episode 32
The midterm congressional elections are still six months away, but the campaign fundraising season, which never really ends is just reaching its peak.
With all the talk about members of Congress' irreconcilable political differences, we wanted to see if they shared any common ground.
And we found some.
For example, there seems to be a permanent majority in Congress that's completely satisfied with the current state of campaign financing and congressional ethics and members of both parties have institutionalized ways to skirt the rules and maintain the lifestyles that many of them have grown accustomed to.
As we learned when we first reported this story last October, most Americans believe it's against the law for congressmen and senators to profit personally from their political office.
But it's an open secret in Washington that that's not the case.
As the saying goes the real scandal in Washington isn't what's illegal, it's what's legal.
Georgia Sen.
Saxby Chambliss likes golf, so much so that he spent more than $100,000 the past two years entertaining at some of the finest courses in the world.
New York congressman Gregory Meeks prefers football.
He spent $35,000 on NFL games.
All of this was paid for with political contributions -- all in the name of democracy.
Peter Schweizer: I think campaign fundraising is increasingly not just about winning elections.
It's a lifestyle subsidy.
Peter Schweizer, is an author and fellow at the Hoover Institution.
For the past few years, he and a team of researchers have been investigating the way congressmen and senators have personally benefited from the hundreds of millions of dollars in political contributions that have poured into the system.
Steve Kroft: I think most people have the impression that campaign funds cannot be used for personal expenses.
Is that true? Peter Schwiezer: Yes.
Regular campaign funds cannot, that's correct.
But there are ways around it.
Like all things in Washington, the devil is in the details, and loopholes are usually put in place for a reason.
For example, when Congress passed the Ethics Reform Act of 1989, it plainly stated "a member shall convert no campaign funds to personal use.
" But soon afterwards congressional leaders quietly invented something called leadership PACs, political action committees that were not technically campaign funds and thus exempt from the personal use prohibition.
Steve Kroft: This is a loophole? Trevor Potter: Right.
That's correct.
Trevor Potter is a former chairman of the Federal Election Commission.
He says it didn't take long for congressmen and senators to figure out the distinct advantages of having a leadership PAC, with no restrictions.
Trevor Potter: Since they weren't around when the ban on personal use was put into place, they're not covered by it.
And they can be used for literally anything.
Over time the leadership PACs that were created as a way for congressional leaders of both parties, to raise money and distribute it to their members, have evolved into something different.
Today, nearly every congressman and senator has a leadership PAC, not just the leaders.
And they are used to solicit contributions from friends and supporters in order to advance their political agendas, their careers and, in many cases, their lifestyle.
Steve Kroft: It's like a political slush fund.
Trevor Potter: That's exactly what it is.
It's a political slush fund.
Over time, we've had them.
They've been outlawed.
They spring back in new guises, and this is the latest guise.
Potter says they are essentially personal political expense accounts financed largely by lobbyists and special interest groups.
Leadership PACs are now the second largest political revenue stream for members of Congress.
Peter Schwiezer: You can use them for babysitting, paying for babysitters.
You can use them for paying for car service.
You can use them for travel.
Nobody's really checking to see whether this is personal or legitimate business expense.
Back in 2006, North Carolina senator and presidential candidate John Edwards used his leadership PAC to pay his mistress Rielle Hunter $114,000 to make a campaign video.
And Republican Congressman Ander Crenshaw of Florida spent $32,000 hosting a tour of California wineries for a group of contributors from the defense industry, which he has some oversight of.
Peter Schweizer: Look, they're not having leadership PAC meetings at the Hampton Inn down the road.
They're going to the premier golfing and resorts in the United States and in-- sometimes around the world.
And that's ostensibly where they're doing this leadership PAC work.
For example, Democratic Congressman Robert Andrews of New Jersey used $16,000 from his leadership PAC "the committee to strengthen America" to fly his family to Scotland, ostensibly to attend the wedding of a friend that he was thinking about hiring as a political consultant.
Peter Schweizer: Why he needed to meet him in Edinburgh, Scotland at a four-star resort, I think, is open to question.
Peter Schweizer: So they will categorize them as something related to the leadership PAC.
But in reality, they're for personal use.
We wanted to talk to Congressman Andrews about his leadership PAC and the family trip to Scotland, but were turned down.
We did manage to find him at a hearing, and passed him a note announcing our presence.
Andrews, it turns out is under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for misusing campaign funds to advance the career of his daughter.
He agreed to talk to us outside.
Steve Kroft: What about this trip to Scotland? Robert Andrews: I follow all the rules, met the standards, and there is a matter pending before the House Ethics Committee.
Under those rules, my obligation's not to talk about the investigation until it's over.
Steve Kroft: We talked to the Ethics Committee.
They said they have no problem with you talking to us about this.
Robert Andrews: Well, it's my understanding that the rules are that, when there's a pending matter, I'm supposed to keep it confidential and so are they.
So, I'm going to follow those rules.
Steve Kroft: These leadership PACs have been described by a lot of people as sort of political slush funds.
Do you agree with that? Robert Andrews: You know, I think we should take a look at having clearer rules at what they can and cannot be spent for.
I'd be for that.
That's what almost everyone in Congress says, but no one really seems to want reform.
It should be pointed out that not all congressmen use their PACs for their personal benefit, but the Federal Election Commission has called the level of abuse substantial.
Its former chairman, Trevor Potter, says the commission has consistently recommended to Congress that it should outlaw the personal use of leadership PACs.
Steve Kroft: And what's happened to that recommendation? Trevor Potter: Nothing.
It enters a black hole.
That's because the leadership PACs have become a political annuity for Congress that members can cash in when they leave office, or hold onto for the future.
Trevor Potter: What you see more often is that members will keep the leadership PAC and they will use it in retirement for everything that is vaguely a political expense.
If they become a lobbyist, which about half of members who leave Congress do nowadays, that becomes their lobbying slush fund.
So it just keeps going, at least until death.
Steve Kroft: And even beyond death.
Trevor Potter: Well, even beyond death, someone else is spending that money.
When Republican Congressman Paul Gillmor of Ohio died suddenly from a heart attack in contribution should go unspent.
Trevor Potter: What we know is that the staff went off to a number of dinners and pizza parties and other events using the leadership PAC money.
What they said was, 'Well, it's a grieving process.
And also, we need to talk to each other about getting new jobs, and this is a way to do it.
' Steve Kroft: And nobody had any problems with that? Trevor Potter: The problem is it's not illegal.
There are lots of things in Washington that would seem to be illegal but really aren't, if you know your way through the loopholes.
Melanie Sloan is the executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a small group that tracks campaign expenditures.
As we said earlier it's against the law to use campaign funds for personal use, but Sloan says it's perfectly acceptable to use campaign funds to hire your wife, husband, children, grandchildren and in-laws.
Melanie Sloan: While there are anti-nepotism rules that prevent them from hiring their family members on the official staff-- they can indeed hire them on the campaign payroll.
And do.
Steve Kroft: And they do? Melanie Sloan: And they do.
Sloan says there are at least 75 members of Congress who have hired members of their family to work on their campaign and paid them with political contributions.
Until Republican Congressman Ron Paul of Texas retired in 2012 he seemed to be the leader with six family members on the campaign payroll: daughter, daughter's mother in law, three grandchildren and a grandchild in law.
Paying them a total of $304,000 over the past two election cycles.
But Paul only ranked third in total payouts to family members, behind former Republican Congressman Jerry Lewis and Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters both of California Steve Kroft: For some congressmen and senators, this is sort of a family business.
Melanie Sloan: Absolutely.
It is a family business.
They have members of their family on the campaign payroll.
And they also will often have members of their family who are lobbyists and lobby on issues in which the member may even be working.
We were interested in talking to Republican Congressman Rodney Alexander who had just retired midterm, after winning a campaign with no Democratic opposition.
A race in which he paid his two daughters a total of $130,000.
Steve Kroft: Hi.
Good.
Congressman? Steve Kroft from 60 Minutes.
We just wanted to ask you about both your daughters on the campaign staff? Steve Kroft: I mean, the figures that we have according to the reports are $73,000 to Lisa Lowe, and $57,000 to Ginger.
Rodney Alexander: That's for a two-year, that's for the election cycle.
Steve Kroft: What exactly did they do? Can you tell me? Rodney Alexander: Do everything that others do for other campaigns-- Whatever they did it couldn't have been that stressful.
Alexander won 78 percent of the vote against a libertarian candidate who wanted to abolish the IRS.
Steve Kroft: I mean, to some people, it just looks like you're using your campaign fund to enrich your family.
Rodney Alexander: Well, somebody has to do that work, Steve.
Steve Kroft: So, you kept it in the family? Rodney Alexander: Well I kept it with somebody that I can trust and if one can't trust their daughter, then who can they trust? Peter Schweizer: I think it's the kind of nepotism that, in large parts of American society, we frown about.
I mean, in corporate America, a lot of corporations have policies that relate to nepotism and the hiring and firing of individual people.
Peter Schweizer: But Congress has created this domain that allows them to decide whether something is ethical or whether something is good.
And it's another example, unfortunately, where the rules that apply to the rest of us don't really apply to members of Congress.
In 2011, Sen.
David Vitter of Louisiana introduced a bill to try and rectify the situation.
It would prohibit members from paying relatives with campaign or leadership accounts.
[Sen.
Vitter: That is a loophole, an area of abuse that we must close.
.]
So far, Sen.
Vitter has not found a single co-sponsor.
And no one is the least bit surprised.
Melanie Sloan: Everyone in Washington knows this goes on.
It's well-known, an open secret.
The problem is people in Ohio and New Mexico have no idea what's going on here in Washington.
Sloan says another way congressmen can personally benefit from the use of political contributions is by making personal loans to their campaign funds, then charging above market and sometimes exorbitant interest rates.
Sloan's organization found at least 15 cases, with the worst offender being Democratic Congresswoman Grace Napolitano who charged her campaign 18 percent.
Steve Kroft: How much money did she loan her campaign? Melanie Sloan: She loaned herself $150,000 and over a 12-year period took in $228,000 in interest.
Steve Kroft: I think everybody would like that investment.
Melanie Sloan: I think so.
Steve Kroft: And that's legal.
Melanie Sloan: And that's legal.
After weeks of trying to get an interview with Congresswoman Napolitano, we finally cornered her outside a meeting of the Hispanic Caucus.
She told us that as a woman and a minority, banks wouldn't lend her money, so she had to she withdraw $150,000 from an investment account to lend it to her campaign.
Steve Kroft: You loaned money to your campaign and then charged the campaign 18 percent interest? Grace Napolitano: That is correct.
Grace Napolitano: To be able to do a lot of the things I had to do were not feasible unless I did what I had to do.
And so at that point, that's what was recommended, and that's what I went with.
Steve Kroft: I don't think there's anything wrong with loaning your campaign money.
But then collecting 18 percent interest from your campaign seems a little too much.
Grace Napolitano: Would you go out and get a loan and not get charged interest? Steve Kroft: It's still 18 percent and $228,000 in interest.
Grace Napolitano: You like to favor 18 percent.
Steve Kroft: I do like to favor.
I mean, that's what the Mafia gets.
Grace Napolitano: It isn't like I've really profited.
I still live in the same house.
I drive a small car.
I am not a billionaire, or a millionaire, for that matter.
Steve Kroft: Did your campaign contributors know that you were paying back a loan, charging the campaign committee 18 percent? Grace Napolitano: Well, you don't go out and publicize that, but they know that I had a campaign debt.
Melanie Sloan: When folks are asked for campaign donations and when they make campaign donations, they are doing it because they are in sync with that member of Congress's views and they want to see them pushing policies and get reelected.
I don't think they have any idea that some of that money is actually going into the member's personal bank account.
There are currently two, modest ethics reform bills pending in Congress that would change a small part of what we've been talking about, one sponsored by a Senate Republican, the other by a House Democrat.
Neither has a prayer of even being debated.
Peter Schweizer: We hear a lot about how there's so much partisan fighting in Washington, Steve.
Here's a great example of bipartisanship.
Both sides like this current system.
In February, Congressman Rob Andrews of New Jersey resigned in the middle of his two-year term, to run the government relations practice of a Philadelphia law firm.
He said that the ethics probe had nothing to do with his decision to quit Congress.
He is leaving, he says, because the new job would pay him more money than his congressional salary.
After our story aired, there were additional legislative attempts to close the leadership PAC loopholeso far they have received very little support.
We usually think of heart disease as a condition that develops late in life.
But in Africa, hundreds of thousands of children are dying every year of heart failure.
Their condition is caused most frequently by strep throat.
It's called "rheumatic heart disease.
" An estimated 15 million African children have it and four out of five of them will die before they reach the age of 25.
If you've never heard of it before, that's because it's long ago been eradicated here in the West.
For most children who have it, the only cure is open heart surgery.
There is just one hospital in all of Africa which offers the expensive operation free of charge.
It's run by an Italian organization called Emergency, whose founder and chief surgeon, Dr.
Gino Strada, believes that doctors have to fight for every life, regardless of the cost.
Our journey began in Sierra Leone, where we met a sweet, healthy-looking girl called Mariata with a ticking time bomb in her chest.
Sierra Leone is a tiny country on Africa's west coast which holds a sad record.
Its population has the lowest life expectancy in the world.
On average, people here only live to the age of 47.
But when Esther's 11-year-old daughter Mariata first became sick, she couldn't imagine that her condition could be fatal.
Mariata was having a hard time walking.
Her breathing was labored.
Her entire body seemed to be slowly shutting down.
Esther: I decided to go with her to hospital.
Esther took her to a hospital run by Emergency, where cardiologist, Dr.
Mimo Risika, examined Mariata and delivered some grave news.
[Mimo Risika: This mitral valve doesn't close.
It's part of the heart.
.]
Dr.
Risika explained that one of Mariata's heart valves was severely damaged.
And that the only thing that could save her life was open heart surgery.
Esther: I asked him, "Doctor what is the cause of this problem?" He told me that it is a sore throat that causes this problem to people.
Clarissa Ward: A sore throat.
Do you remember having a sore throat? Esther: (Mariata nods.
) Yeah.
Clarissa Ward: Yeah.
When Mariata was just four years old, she had strep throat, an infection caused by the streptococcus bacteria.
Kids everywhere get it, but because Mariata lives here, she wasn't taken to the doctor and wasn't given antibiotics.
When repeated infections go untreated, they can lead to a far more serious condition: a damaged heart valve which in Africa is almost always a death sentence.
There is nothing Dr.
Rizika can do for her except send her medical file to Emergency's hospital in Sudan to see if they will take on her case.
It is Mariata's only hope.
In a refugee camp in Sudan, we met the man who runs that hospital.
Gino Strada: Here we are really talking about, you know, drying the ocean - with a spoon.
Dr.
Gino Strada, Emergency's founder, is a heart surgeon.
He first arrived here 10 years ago to treat the victims of Sudan's vicious civil war.
What he found was a community ravaged by a disease.
Emergency started a clinic where staff test for the dangerous streptococcus bacteria and treat it with antibiotics.
But preventative medicine wasn't going to help the children who already had the deadly heart condition.
Gino Strada: Here we are in hell because the death toll that these children pay for rheumatic heart disease is just unbearable.
So he decided to do something radical: to offer cardiac surgery, free of charge, right here in Sudan.
With some funding from the Sudanese government and from Emergency's donors in the West, he built the Salaam Center, a gleaming, state of the art hospital where he presides over a surgical team that performs four to six open heart operations a day.
Gino Strada: You know, when Emergency decided to build here in Sudan, a center of cardiac surgery, we were heavily criticized, "Oh, this is crazy.
This is not what the Sudanese people need.
" And our answer was, "Why not cardiac surgery?" Clarissa Ward: Well, the argument would be that you're spending a lot of money saving relatively few lives where you could be spending that money saving many more lives.
Gino Strada: Absolutely.
That's true.
And that's why there are a lot of agencies who are entirely devoted to focus on communicable diseases and malaria and vaccinations, and all this.
And this has to be done.
But it cannot be the only approach.
Dr.
Strada's approach is to fight for every life.
Gino Strada: This disease alone kills, in Africa, more than 300,000 people every year.
Clarissa Ward: But what percentage do you save of that? Gino Strada: Oh, very small one, insignificant because we can do 1,500 operations per year, no more.
One hospital for a continent, obviously, is not the solution of the problem.
It's just a seed.
It's a seed that Dr.
Strada wants to spread.
Which is why he brings in patients from other countries.
Dr.
Rizika's mission in Sierra Leone was to identify the most urgent cases and suggest them as candidates for surgery in Sudan.
[Mimo Risika: OK, so please check it today.
OK?.]
While we were there, he was called in to see another little girl, Sufiatu.
[Mimo Risika: Sufiatu, how are you?.]
Hers was an urgent case.
Her body was struggling to fight off a severe infection that had formed around her damaged heart valve.
[Mimo Risika: Let's check the eco, hmmm?.]
The question was not whether or not to send her to Sudan.
It was whether she would survive the grueling journey.
[Mimo Risika: She must be operated as soon as possible.
.]
Most of the kids Dr.
Risika sees here are not as far gone as Sufiatu.
But without surgery to repair their hearts, none of them have long to live.
[Mimo Risika: She's ready for surgery.
.]
And Emergency can only afford to save a handful of them.
After two days in the hospital, Sufiatu was able to walk on her ownenough for the doctors to declare her fit to travel.
She joined Mariata and three other very sick children who gathered with their mothers for the trip.
Together they set out on the 4,000-mile journey to Sudan.
None of the kids - or their mothers - had ever travelled so far.
Never been on a ferry, never taken a flight, never been to another country by the last leg of the trip, Sufiatu was fading and by the time they landed, she had to be rushed by ambulance to the Salaam Center.
[Mimo Risika: She's very weak.
.]
She was taken into surgery the very next day.
[Gino Strada: Metzenbaum.]
Dr.
Strada invited us to watch the operation.
Gino Strada: There's the heart.
And explained what he was doing.
Clarissa Ward: So you're preparing now to stop her heart completely? Gino Strada: Yeah.
Clarissa Ward: And her body temperature will be taken right down? Gino Strada: Yeah, down to 30 degrees.
Clarissa Ward: And the only thing keeping her alive will be this machine here? Gino Strada: Exactly.
Dr.
Strada gently removes the heavily infected valve.
Clarissa Ward: Can you see already how bad the damage is? Gino Strada: Yes, extremely bad, extremely bad.
God knows how they survive in these conditions.
He carefully positions the artificial valve and then stitch by stitch, secures it firmly in place.
Gino Strada: OK, flow down.
Hunter: OK, flow's down.
The operator of the bypass machine begins restoring the blood flow to the heart.
Clarissa Ward: Now the heart is about to start beating for itself again? Gino Strada: Hopefully.
Clarissa Ward: Hopefully.
Gino Strada: OK, stop.
Hunter: Pump's off.
Gino Strada: Cannula is out.
Clarissa Ward: Is that the hardest part over? Gino Strada: Yeah.
Sufiatu will spend the next few days in an intensive care unit.
Even if the operation is successful she will rely on Emergency for drugs and medical care for the rest of her life.
But that still beats the alternative.
Clarissa Ward: Without this surgery, how long could she have survived? Gino Strada: Well, from one day to three months.
Clarissa Ward: But not longer than three months? Gino Strada: No.
Clarissa Ward: So how many heart surgeries have you done? Gino Strada: Well, at this center, I think we did slightly over 5,000.
Clarissa Ward: But you personally in your life? Gino Strada: Oh, I didn't count, but I do it every day.
Clarissa Ward: So thousands? Gino Strada: Yeah, I'm basically a surgical animal, you know, that's the only thing I can do.
He's been doing it for decades.
After medical school he trained at Stanford and Pittsburgh Universities before joining the Red Cross to become, as he calls it, a war surgeon.
But he felt that he could do more.
So he started Emergency, a small organization devoted to the treatment of victims of war that quickly became known for going where other groups don't.
Clarissa Ward: Emergency has a reputation for pushing the envelope, for pushing right onto the front lines.
Is that necessary? Gino Strada: Well, it is.
Because that's where the most wounded are.
But to get to the frontlines, Emergency works closely with some of the world's darkest regimes including, here in Sudan, notorious President Omar al Bashir who has been indicted for war crimes.
The small organization Dr.
Strada started countries and, at 65, Dr.
Strada now lives at the Salaam Center full-time.
At eight o'clock every morning he sits down to discuss the day's cases.
Today, the first patient under his knife will be Mariata, the first little girl we met in Sierra Leone.
As Dr.
Strada prepared to perform the secular magic of open heart surgery, Mariata's mother Esther led the Sierra Leone group in prayer, singing to God to steady the surgeon's hand.
[Esther, singing: I heard about youI heard about you.]
[Clarissa Ward: Look at that, wow.
.]
The operation was a success.
Clarissa Ward: Does it feel good to see it start beating again? Gino Strada: Yes, much better than the opposite.
Believe me.
Mariata is one of the fortunate few.
She won't share the fate of hundreds of thousands of children who die of this disease each year.
Clarissa Ward: How do you choose the small handful that get flown over here for this state of the art treatment? Gino Strada: It's just a matter of coincidences.
Clarissa Ward: But in a sense, you choose who lives and who doesn't? Gino Strada: You know, every time you say yes to someone, you are automatically say no to somebody else.
We can perform 1,500 operations per year, so we can distribute We went to the ward to see how one of those winners, Sufiatu, was doing.
Clarissa Ward: Pick which ones you wantthe pink hearts? You can't go wrong with pink hearts, right? She was making a remarkable recovery.
And just a week after they arrived, she, Mariata and all the other kids from Sierra Leone were back on their feet.
They were, quite simply, reborn in the operating room.
Gino Strada: It's a disease where the young, the kids, the teenagers, pay the highest price.
We are trying to do the small things that we can do.
And we know it's a drop in the ocean.
Salmon is the most popular fish on American dinner plates, but most of it is no longer fished out of the sea.
Close to three quarters of our salmon is farmed - grown in cages suspended in the open ocean in places like South America, Europe and Canada.
It's a multibillion dollar industry now, but many environmental organizations are concerned these farms could be spreading diseases into the wild.
And they've issued a red-label warning for farmed salmon, urging consumers to avoid buying the product because of its potential environmental impact.
Salmon farmers say the industry has improved over the years, and they're actually helping to save the last remaining wild salmon in the sea.
into the wild.
And they've issued a red-label warning for farmed salmon, urging consumers to avoid buying the product because of its potential environmental impact.
Salmon farmers say the industry has improved over the years, and they're actually helping to save the last remaining wild salmon in the sea.
Ian Roberts: So we're arriving to the farm now.
Sanjay Gupta: That's it, right? Ian Roberts: Yeah, yeah.
Ian Roberts has been farming salmon in Canada for more than 20 years.
He works for Marine Harvest.
They're the biggest salmon farming company in the world, and he took us to see one of their farms in British Columbia.
Sanjay Gupta: Pretty spectacular.
Ian Roberts: This is the office.
This farm is about 150 miles north of Vancouver.
Sanjay Gupta: When you come out here, it is so beautiful.
And the argument is that these farms threaten the pristine nature of this beauty.
Is that a fair argument? Ian Roberts: No.
While there is a local impact, and let's be honest, when you farm anything, whether it's vegetables or animals on land, you have an impact.
But you're also taking pressure off wild stocks.
By raising fish in the ocean, we're actually conserving what we have left in the ocean.
What's left in the ocean is in trouble.
The number of wild salmon in both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans has been on a steady decline over the past century while the demand for salmon just keeps rising.
So Ian Roberts says he sees it as almost his duty to farm fish.
Ian Roberts: We farm everything we eat.
All our vegetables are farmed.
All our meats are farmed.
The ocean is the last place where we hunted and gathered.
The problem is there is seven billion of us now on this planet.
And the oceans can't give us any more fish.
We owe it to our oceans to make sure that we're providing an alternate to just capturing the last wild fish.
Marine Harvest owns about 30 farms just like this one in British Columbia.
Each farm is about the size of a couple football fields, built in calm ocean inlets where farmed salmon can thrive.
Ian Roberts: Here, I'll get you just to grab his tail there and see how he kicks.
Sanjay Gupta: OK.
Am I being hazed? Is that what that was? Ian Roberts: That's exactly what it is.
Ian Roberts: That's a nice lookin' fish.
While these fish appear normal Sanjay Gupta: You're free, into the pen.
the environment they live in is anything but normal.
Salmon - which are naturally white in color - get their pink color from eating shrimp and other creatures in the wild that have chemicals called carotenoids.
Sanjay Gupta: So this is the feed? Let's talk a look.
These farmed salmon get synthetic versions of the chemical added to their food - which give them that classic pink color consumers expect.
Ian Roberts: We can adjust the amount of carotenoids in the diet to adjust the color.
(Alarm sound) Ian Roberts: That's the oxygen alarm.
Sanjay Gupta: So does that mean the oxygen has just gone down-- Ian Roberts: Too low, yeah.
Sanjay Gupta: Is that a limitation of a farm? Because if they were in the wild, they would swim deeper or go to a different place.
Ian Roberts: Sure.
Yeah, you need to manage the environment where your animals live.
That's farming.
Each of these pens holds 60,000 fish, and one of the concerns about these farms is that this tight concentration can lead to otherwise harmless viruses mutating into superbugs, and then spreading.
Sanjay Gupta: One of the things that happens in humans is if they live in close quarters, what might otherwise be a relatively harmless infection can spread very quickly.
Is that an issue here? Ian Roberts: Well, we have to be aware of that because it is intensive culture.
It is something that we take into consideration.
So farmers vaccinate salmon against known viruses but the vaccines don't always work.
Every year there are outbreaks on salmon farms, and some scientists are concerned those diseases could spread to wild salmon.
Alexandra Morton: Salmon farming cannot be done in the ocean in net pens without destroying the environment around it.
That's a strong statement, but it's one Alexandra Morton, a prominent environmental activist and scientist, has been trying to prove for the past two decades.
Sanjay Gupta: The idea of farming is something that most people are familiar with, cows and chickens and things like that.
Why should salmon farming be different? Alexandra Morton: These are not farms.
These are feed lots.
They're growing as many animals as possible, as fast as possible, in as small a space as possible.
What worries her is what happened five years ago, when salmon farms in Chile made news [CBS News report: In Chile's Northern Patagonia, the salmon are dying.]
A highly communicable, and deadly, virus called Infectious Salmon Anemia, or ISA, broke out on the farms in Chile, and wiped out most of the farmed salmon there.
Alexandra Morton: The story in Chile's interesting because the virus they think got in there they were kinda fooling around with it.
Maybe it's here.
Maybe it's not.
No, it's not here.
And then whammo, the thing just ignited.
Sanjay Gupta: How bad did it get in Chile and how bad could it get here? Alexandra Morton: They could not believe how many fish it killed.
It caused $2 billion of damage.
But they don't have wild salmon.
Nobody knows what's gonna happen here.
This salmon farming experiment, this is the only place it's going on amongst abundant wild salmon.
Here we are risking everything on this coast.
So Morton tests wild salmon in British Columbia for the virus, ISA - the one that caused so much trouble in Chile.
Sanjay Gupta: What are you looking for right now? Alexandra Morton: Right now I'm looking for a freshly dead fish.
She combs the riverbanks for wild salmon that are dying during the natural spawning cycle.
She's looking for evidence of viruses she believes are being passed from farmed salmon to the wild fish.
Alexandra Morton: You open up a fish and it's like a book.
Sanjay Gupta: This-- I mean, you're doing an autopsy? Alexandra Morton: I am doing an autopsy, yes.
She sends off tissue samples to labs around the world, including the one that diagnosed the problem in Chile.
Alexandra Morton: And let's see what the liver looks like.
So far her tests have shown genetic markers for the ISA virus - indication, she says, that the virus is already present in these waters.
Sanjay Gupta: There are salmon farmers who will say, "Look-- these viruses don't cause a problem.
There's a difference between the presence of a virus and infection and a fish actually getting sick.
And it's important to distinguish these things?" Alexandra Morton: Yes.
They have no idea.
There's nobody actually looking at the wild fish carefully.
So that remains an open question.
Sanjay Gupta: So we don't know for sure that they're causing a problem.
But we don't know that they're not? Alexandra Morton: That's right.
So we're gambling.
Sanjay Gupta: One of the things you hear is that these fish could have an impact on the wild fish that swim through this area.
Why not just put these farms somewhere where they're not in that kind of proximity? Ian Roberts: We have relocated farms over the past, identifying that they're not in the best areas, perhaps and they're in sensitive habitat.
But I don't believe that aquaculture in British Columbia is having an effect on the wild fish.
If it was, I wouldn't be a part of the business.
Farmers and environmentalists have their differences, but Ian Roberts acknowledges Alexandra Morton's role in raising legitimate concerns about the effect on ecosystem in the early days of salmon farming.
Sanjay Gupta: Wow, look at-- that's-- that's so beautiful.
While dolphins and other sea mammals may be a stunning part of this landscape they can be a nuisance to salmon farms, stealing fish and damaging nets.
So, Morton says, the farms used to blast loud sounds under water to scare the mammals away.
Alexandra Morton: Humpback whale.
Sanjay Gupta: Just like that! But those devices could hurt the animals, and they disrupted migratory patterns of some whales.
Alexandra Morton: There she goes.
Sanjay Gupta: There's the tail.
In response to pressure from Morton and other environmentalists, the farms stopped using the underwater noise devices and instead built better fences around the farms.
Ian Roberts: Seals and sea lions have been a problem in the past.
But the technology we use today and the thickness of the nets and the way we anchor the nets really keeps them away from the farm.
This farm hasn't had any issues.
Sanjay Gupta: I'm curious, you've got 600,000 fish.
What does it look like below here? Ian Roberts: It looks like a muddy bottom, but it's got nutrients on top, which is the fish waste.
Sanjay Gupta: I've heard the term "dead zone.
" It's called the-- that doesn't sound good when you hear "dead zone" underneath these farms.
Is that a fair assessment? Ian Roberts: No.
No, not at all.
There's-- added nutrients below the farms.
Added nutrients bring in life.
Prawns come to the farm to feed on those nutrients.
But there is an impact to the bottom of the ocean, but that's only temporary.
Farms are sometimes left fallow between harvests because studies show the impact to the bottom of the ocean can be significant - with trace metals and organic waste polluting the ocean floor.
Morton says it can take years for the ocean bottom to recover, and she took us outside a fallowed farm to show us what it looks like below.
She dropped a special underwater camera 300 feet down.
Sanjay Gupta: So, what do we have? Alexandra Morton: You see the brown waste of the farm.
Sanjay Gupta: So, that mushy, spongy stuff -- is that just an accumulation or layer of waste? Alexandra Morton: That is farmed salmon poop.
There are 125 salmon farms along the coastline of British Columbia, and the Canadian government plans to allow more.
But just up the coast, in Alaska, salmon farms simply don't exist.
George Eliason: There's no room for farmed salmon in Alaska.
George Eliason is a third generation fisherman in Alaskawhich has the largest wild salmon fishery in the world.
Twenty-five years ago, Alaska banned salmon farming out of concern that the farming industry could harm the lucrative fishing trade.
Eliason's father was the state senator who drafted the legislation to outlaw salmon farming.
Sanjay Gupta: What was the concern back then? George Eliason: Disease.
Pollution.
Sanjay Gupta: The concerns that your father had about what it might do to the wild salmon population, was he right? George Eliason: He was right.
We've got a great fishery up there now.
Why take the chance? Why even try it? Instead of farming fish, the Alaskan government set up hatcheries where young salmon are grown and then released - not into cages - but into the wild to boost the population of wild salmon in the ocean.
George Eliason: We call it ocean ranching.
Sanjay Gupta: Should they still be called wild salmon or has that become a misnomer at this point? George Eliason: They're wild.
They're wild.
Ocean ranching, combined with careful regulations, has created a thriving wild salmon population in Alaska, a stark contrast to the situation in western Canada.
In 2009, when sockeye salmon numbers on a major river in British Columbia hit a historic low, the Canadian government launched an ambitious two-year-long Commission to finally explore the causes of the decline.
Brian Wallace, senior counsel to the Commission, says they examined more than a half million documents, including Alexandra Morton's research.
Sanjay Gupta: She makes a claim that ISA virus has been found in the waters and the fish of British Columbia.
Is that true? Brian Wallace: I don't know whether that's true or not.
Sanjay Gupta: How can we not know if that's true? I mean, we're not talking about opinion or conjecture; we're talking about science here.
Male voice: We don't have the answer.
Sanjay Gupta: You looked at 600,000 documents, and you spent $26 million.
We should have some sort of answer here, shouldn't we? Brian Wallace: This is a very complex subject.
Somebody said, you know, "This isn't rocket scientist-- science, it's much more complicated than that.
" Sanjay Gupta: So we don't know that the virus is not here, and we don't know if it is here? Brian Wallace: I think that's correct.
The Commission determined that climate change and other environmental factors were likely causes of the decline in wild salmon in western Canada, but said disease transmission from farms could be a factor as well.
So the Commission recommended a moratorium on any new farms built along the most sensitive sockeye salmon migration routes and it gave farmers eight years to prove there was no significant risk of passing viruses to wild fish.
Sanjay Gupta: It sounds like until the virus actually gets out of these farms and into the wild population that's gonna establish the risk.
Brian Wallace: That's one way to establish it.
Sanjay Gupta: That sounds like it'd be too late.
Brian Wallace: I hope not.
With all the talk about members of Congress' irreconcilable political differences, we wanted to see if they shared any common ground.
And we found some.
For example, there seems to be a permanent majority in Congress that's completely satisfied with the current state of campaign financing and congressional ethics and members of both parties have institutionalized ways to skirt the rules and maintain the lifestyles that many of them have grown accustomed to.
As we learned when we first reported this story last October, most Americans believe it's against the law for congressmen and senators to profit personally from their political office.
But it's an open secret in Washington that that's not the case.
As the saying goes the real scandal in Washington isn't what's illegal, it's what's legal.
Georgia Sen.
Saxby Chambliss likes golf, so much so that he spent more than $100,000 the past two years entertaining at some of the finest courses in the world.
New York congressman Gregory Meeks prefers football.
He spent $35,000 on NFL games.
All of this was paid for with political contributions -- all in the name of democracy.
Peter Schweizer: I think campaign fundraising is increasingly not just about winning elections.
It's a lifestyle subsidy.
Peter Schweizer, is an author and fellow at the Hoover Institution.
For the past few years, he and a team of researchers have been investigating the way congressmen and senators have personally benefited from the hundreds of millions of dollars in political contributions that have poured into the system.
Steve Kroft: I think most people have the impression that campaign funds cannot be used for personal expenses.
Is that true? Peter Schwiezer: Yes.
Regular campaign funds cannot, that's correct.
But there are ways around it.
Like all things in Washington, the devil is in the details, and loopholes are usually put in place for a reason.
For example, when Congress passed the Ethics Reform Act of 1989, it plainly stated "a member shall convert no campaign funds to personal use.
" But soon afterwards congressional leaders quietly invented something called leadership PACs, political action committees that were not technically campaign funds and thus exempt from the personal use prohibition.
Steve Kroft: This is a loophole? Trevor Potter: Right.
That's correct.
Trevor Potter is a former chairman of the Federal Election Commission.
He says it didn't take long for congressmen and senators to figure out the distinct advantages of having a leadership PAC, with no restrictions.
Trevor Potter: Since they weren't around when the ban on personal use was put into place, they're not covered by it.
And they can be used for literally anything.
Over time the leadership PACs that were created as a way for congressional leaders of both parties, to raise money and distribute it to their members, have evolved into something different.
Today, nearly every congressman and senator has a leadership PAC, not just the leaders.
And they are used to solicit contributions from friends and supporters in order to advance their political agendas, their careers and, in many cases, their lifestyle.
Steve Kroft: It's like a political slush fund.
Trevor Potter: That's exactly what it is.
It's a political slush fund.
Over time, we've had them.
They've been outlawed.
They spring back in new guises, and this is the latest guise.
Potter says they are essentially personal political expense accounts financed largely by lobbyists and special interest groups.
Leadership PACs are now the second largest political revenue stream for members of Congress.
Peter Schwiezer: You can use them for babysitting, paying for babysitters.
You can use them for paying for car service.
You can use them for travel.
Nobody's really checking to see whether this is personal or legitimate business expense.
Back in 2006, North Carolina senator and presidential candidate John Edwards used his leadership PAC to pay his mistress Rielle Hunter $114,000 to make a campaign video.
And Republican Congressman Ander Crenshaw of Florida spent $32,000 hosting a tour of California wineries for a group of contributors from the defense industry, which he has some oversight of.
Peter Schweizer: Look, they're not having leadership PAC meetings at the Hampton Inn down the road.
They're going to the premier golfing and resorts in the United States and in-- sometimes around the world.
And that's ostensibly where they're doing this leadership PAC work.
For example, Democratic Congressman Robert Andrews of New Jersey used $16,000 from his leadership PAC "the committee to strengthen America" to fly his family to Scotland, ostensibly to attend the wedding of a friend that he was thinking about hiring as a political consultant.
Peter Schweizer: Why he needed to meet him in Edinburgh, Scotland at a four-star resort, I think, is open to question.
Peter Schweizer: So they will categorize them as something related to the leadership PAC.
But in reality, they're for personal use.
We wanted to talk to Congressman Andrews about his leadership PAC and the family trip to Scotland, but were turned down.
We did manage to find him at a hearing, and passed him a note announcing our presence.
Andrews, it turns out is under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for misusing campaign funds to advance the career of his daughter.
He agreed to talk to us outside.
Steve Kroft: What about this trip to Scotland? Robert Andrews: I follow all the rules, met the standards, and there is a matter pending before the House Ethics Committee.
Under those rules, my obligation's not to talk about the investigation until it's over.
Steve Kroft: We talked to the Ethics Committee.
They said they have no problem with you talking to us about this.
Robert Andrews: Well, it's my understanding that the rules are that, when there's a pending matter, I'm supposed to keep it confidential and so are they.
So, I'm going to follow those rules.
Steve Kroft: These leadership PACs have been described by a lot of people as sort of political slush funds.
Do you agree with that? Robert Andrews: You know, I think we should take a look at having clearer rules at what they can and cannot be spent for.
I'd be for that.
That's what almost everyone in Congress says, but no one really seems to want reform.
It should be pointed out that not all congressmen use their PACs for their personal benefit, but the Federal Election Commission has called the level of abuse substantial.
Its former chairman, Trevor Potter, says the commission has consistently recommended to Congress that it should outlaw the personal use of leadership PACs.
Steve Kroft: And what's happened to that recommendation? Trevor Potter: Nothing.
It enters a black hole.
That's because the leadership PACs have become a political annuity for Congress that members can cash in when they leave office, or hold onto for the future.
Trevor Potter: What you see more often is that members will keep the leadership PAC and they will use it in retirement for everything that is vaguely a political expense.
If they become a lobbyist, which about half of members who leave Congress do nowadays, that becomes their lobbying slush fund.
So it just keeps going, at least until death.
Steve Kroft: And even beyond death.
Trevor Potter: Well, even beyond death, someone else is spending that money.
When Republican Congressman Paul Gillmor of Ohio died suddenly from a heart attack in contribution should go unspent.
Trevor Potter: What we know is that the staff went off to a number of dinners and pizza parties and other events using the leadership PAC money.
What they said was, 'Well, it's a grieving process.
And also, we need to talk to each other about getting new jobs, and this is a way to do it.
' Steve Kroft: And nobody had any problems with that? Trevor Potter: The problem is it's not illegal.
There are lots of things in Washington that would seem to be illegal but really aren't, if you know your way through the loopholes.
Melanie Sloan is the executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a small group that tracks campaign expenditures.
As we said earlier it's against the law to use campaign funds for personal use, but Sloan says it's perfectly acceptable to use campaign funds to hire your wife, husband, children, grandchildren and in-laws.
Melanie Sloan: While there are anti-nepotism rules that prevent them from hiring their family members on the official staff-- they can indeed hire them on the campaign payroll.
And do.
Steve Kroft: And they do? Melanie Sloan: And they do.
Sloan says there are at least 75 members of Congress who have hired members of their family to work on their campaign and paid them with political contributions.
Until Republican Congressman Ron Paul of Texas retired in 2012 he seemed to be the leader with six family members on the campaign payroll: daughter, daughter's mother in law, three grandchildren and a grandchild in law.
Paying them a total of $304,000 over the past two election cycles.
But Paul only ranked third in total payouts to family members, behind former Republican Congressman Jerry Lewis and Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters both of California Steve Kroft: For some congressmen and senators, this is sort of a family business.
Melanie Sloan: Absolutely.
It is a family business.
They have members of their family on the campaign payroll.
And they also will often have members of their family who are lobbyists and lobby on issues in which the member may even be working.
We were interested in talking to Republican Congressman Rodney Alexander who had just retired midterm, after winning a campaign with no Democratic opposition.
A race in which he paid his two daughters a total of $130,000.
Steve Kroft: Hi.
Good.
Congressman? Steve Kroft from 60 Minutes.
We just wanted to ask you about both your daughters on the campaign staff? Steve Kroft: I mean, the figures that we have according to the reports are $73,000 to Lisa Lowe, and $57,000 to Ginger.
Rodney Alexander: That's for a two-year, that's for the election cycle.
Steve Kroft: What exactly did they do? Can you tell me? Rodney Alexander: Do everything that others do for other campaigns-- Whatever they did it couldn't have been that stressful.
Alexander won 78 percent of the vote against a libertarian candidate who wanted to abolish the IRS.
Steve Kroft: I mean, to some people, it just looks like you're using your campaign fund to enrich your family.
Rodney Alexander: Well, somebody has to do that work, Steve.
Steve Kroft: So, you kept it in the family? Rodney Alexander: Well I kept it with somebody that I can trust and if one can't trust their daughter, then who can they trust? Peter Schweizer: I think it's the kind of nepotism that, in large parts of American society, we frown about.
I mean, in corporate America, a lot of corporations have policies that relate to nepotism and the hiring and firing of individual people.
Peter Schweizer: But Congress has created this domain that allows them to decide whether something is ethical or whether something is good.
And it's another example, unfortunately, where the rules that apply to the rest of us don't really apply to members of Congress.
In 2011, Sen.
David Vitter of Louisiana introduced a bill to try and rectify the situation.
It would prohibit members from paying relatives with campaign or leadership accounts.
[Sen.
Vitter: That is a loophole, an area of abuse that we must close.
.]
So far, Sen.
Vitter has not found a single co-sponsor.
And no one is the least bit surprised.
Melanie Sloan: Everyone in Washington knows this goes on.
It's well-known, an open secret.
The problem is people in Ohio and New Mexico have no idea what's going on here in Washington.
Sloan says another way congressmen can personally benefit from the use of political contributions is by making personal loans to their campaign funds, then charging above market and sometimes exorbitant interest rates.
Sloan's organization found at least 15 cases, with the worst offender being Democratic Congresswoman Grace Napolitano who charged her campaign 18 percent.
Steve Kroft: How much money did she loan her campaign? Melanie Sloan: She loaned herself $150,000 and over a 12-year period took in $228,000 in interest.
Steve Kroft: I think everybody would like that investment.
Melanie Sloan: I think so.
Steve Kroft: And that's legal.
Melanie Sloan: And that's legal.
After weeks of trying to get an interview with Congresswoman Napolitano, we finally cornered her outside a meeting of the Hispanic Caucus.
She told us that as a woman and a minority, banks wouldn't lend her money, so she had to she withdraw $150,000 from an investment account to lend it to her campaign.
Steve Kroft: You loaned money to your campaign and then charged the campaign 18 percent interest? Grace Napolitano: That is correct.
Grace Napolitano: To be able to do a lot of the things I had to do were not feasible unless I did what I had to do.
And so at that point, that's what was recommended, and that's what I went with.
Steve Kroft: I don't think there's anything wrong with loaning your campaign money.
But then collecting 18 percent interest from your campaign seems a little too much.
Grace Napolitano: Would you go out and get a loan and not get charged interest? Steve Kroft: It's still 18 percent and $228,000 in interest.
Grace Napolitano: You like to favor 18 percent.
Steve Kroft: I do like to favor.
I mean, that's what the Mafia gets.
Grace Napolitano: It isn't like I've really profited.
I still live in the same house.
I drive a small car.
I am not a billionaire, or a millionaire, for that matter.
Steve Kroft: Did your campaign contributors know that you were paying back a loan, charging the campaign committee 18 percent? Grace Napolitano: Well, you don't go out and publicize that, but they know that I had a campaign debt.
Melanie Sloan: When folks are asked for campaign donations and when they make campaign donations, they are doing it because they are in sync with that member of Congress's views and they want to see them pushing policies and get reelected.
I don't think they have any idea that some of that money is actually going into the member's personal bank account.
There are currently two, modest ethics reform bills pending in Congress that would change a small part of what we've been talking about, one sponsored by a Senate Republican, the other by a House Democrat.
Neither has a prayer of even being debated.
Peter Schweizer: We hear a lot about how there's so much partisan fighting in Washington, Steve.
Here's a great example of bipartisanship.
Both sides like this current system.
In February, Congressman Rob Andrews of New Jersey resigned in the middle of his two-year term, to run the government relations practice of a Philadelphia law firm.
He said that the ethics probe had nothing to do with his decision to quit Congress.
He is leaving, he says, because the new job would pay him more money than his congressional salary.
After our story aired, there were additional legislative attempts to close the leadership PAC loopholeso far they have received very little support.
We usually think of heart disease as a condition that develops late in life.
But in Africa, hundreds of thousands of children are dying every year of heart failure.
Their condition is caused most frequently by strep throat.
It's called "rheumatic heart disease.
" An estimated 15 million African children have it and four out of five of them will die before they reach the age of 25.
If you've never heard of it before, that's because it's long ago been eradicated here in the West.
For most children who have it, the only cure is open heart surgery.
There is just one hospital in all of Africa which offers the expensive operation free of charge.
It's run by an Italian organization called Emergency, whose founder and chief surgeon, Dr.
Gino Strada, believes that doctors have to fight for every life, regardless of the cost.
Our journey began in Sierra Leone, where we met a sweet, healthy-looking girl called Mariata with a ticking time bomb in her chest.
Sierra Leone is a tiny country on Africa's west coast which holds a sad record.
Its population has the lowest life expectancy in the world.
On average, people here only live to the age of 47.
But when Esther's 11-year-old daughter Mariata first became sick, she couldn't imagine that her condition could be fatal.
Mariata was having a hard time walking.
Her breathing was labored.
Her entire body seemed to be slowly shutting down.
Esther: I decided to go with her to hospital.
Esther took her to a hospital run by Emergency, where cardiologist, Dr.
Mimo Risika, examined Mariata and delivered some grave news.
[Mimo Risika: This mitral valve doesn't close.
It's part of the heart.
.]
Dr.
Risika explained that one of Mariata's heart valves was severely damaged.
And that the only thing that could save her life was open heart surgery.
Esther: I asked him, "Doctor what is the cause of this problem?" He told me that it is a sore throat that causes this problem to people.
Clarissa Ward: A sore throat.
Do you remember having a sore throat? Esther: (Mariata nods.
) Yeah.
Clarissa Ward: Yeah.
When Mariata was just four years old, she had strep throat, an infection caused by the streptococcus bacteria.
Kids everywhere get it, but because Mariata lives here, she wasn't taken to the doctor and wasn't given antibiotics.
When repeated infections go untreated, they can lead to a far more serious condition: a damaged heart valve which in Africa is almost always a death sentence.
There is nothing Dr.
Rizika can do for her except send her medical file to Emergency's hospital in Sudan to see if they will take on her case.
It is Mariata's only hope.
In a refugee camp in Sudan, we met the man who runs that hospital.
Gino Strada: Here we are really talking about, you know, drying the ocean - with a spoon.
Dr.
Gino Strada, Emergency's founder, is a heart surgeon.
He first arrived here 10 years ago to treat the victims of Sudan's vicious civil war.
What he found was a community ravaged by a disease.
Emergency started a clinic where staff test for the dangerous streptococcus bacteria and treat it with antibiotics.
But preventative medicine wasn't going to help the children who already had the deadly heart condition.
Gino Strada: Here we are in hell because the death toll that these children pay for rheumatic heart disease is just unbearable.
So he decided to do something radical: to offer cardiac surgery, free of charge, right here in Sudan.
With some funding from the Sudanese government and from Emergency's donors in the West, he built the Salaam Center, a gleaming, state of the art hospital where he presides over a surgical team that performs four to six open heart operations a day.
Gino Strada: You know, when Emergency decided to build here in Sudan, a center of cardiac surgery, we were heavily criticized, "Oh, this is crazy.
This is not what the Sudanese people need.
" And our answer was, "Why not cardiac surgery?" Clarissa Ward: Well, the argument would be that you're spending a lot of money saving relatively few lives where you could be spending that money saving many more lives.
Gino Strada: Absolutely.
That's true.
And that's why there are a lot of agencies who are entirely devoted to focus on communicable diseases and malaria and vaccinations, and all this.
And this has to be done.
But it cannot be the only approach.
Dr.
Strada's approach is to fight for every life.
Gino Strada: This disease alone kills, in Africa, more than 300,000 people every year.
Clarissa Ward: But what percentage do you save of that? Gino Strada: Oh, very small one, insignificant because we can do 1,500 operations per year, no more.
One hospital for a continent, obviously, is not the solution of the problem.
It's just a seed.
It's a seed that Dr.
Strada wants to spread.
Which is why he brings in patients from other countries.
Dr.
Rizika's mission in Sierra Leone was to identify the most urgent cases and suggest them as candidates for surgery in Sudan.
[Mimo Risika: OK, so please check it today.
OK?.]
While we were there, he was called in to see another little girl, Sufiatu.
[Mimo Risika: Sufiatu, how are you?.]
Hers was an urgent case.
Her body was struggling to fight off a severe infection that had formed around her damaged heart valve.
[Mimo Risika: Let's check the eco, hmmm?.]
The question was not whether or not to send her to Sudan.
It was whether she would survive the grueling journey.
[Mimo Risika: She must be operated as soon as possible.
.]
Most of the kids Dr.
Risika sees here are not as far gone as Sufiatu.
But without surgery to repair their hearts, none of them have long to live.
[Mimo Risika: She's ready for surgery.
.]
And Emergency can only afford to save a handful of them.
After two days in the hospital, Sufiatu was able to walk on her ownenough for the doctors to declare her fit to travel.
She joined Mariata and three other very sick children who gathered with their mothers for the trip.
Together they set out on the 4,000-mile journey to Sudan.
None of the kids - or their mothers - had ever travelled so far.
Never been on a ferry, never taken a flight, never been to another country by the last leg of the trip, Sufiatu was fading and by the time they landed, she had to be rushed by ambulance to the Salaam Center.
[Mimo Risika: She's very weak.
.]
She was taken into surgery the very next day.
[Gino Strada: Metzenbaum.]
Dr.
Strada invited us to watch the operation.
Gino Strada: There's the heart.
And explained what he was doing.
Clarissa Ward: So you're preparing now to stop her heart completely? Gino Strada: Yeah.
Clarissa Ward: And her body temperature will be taken right down? Gino Strada: Yeah, down to 30 degrees.
Clarissa Ward: And the only thing keeping her alive will be this machine here? Gino Strada: Exactly.
Dr.
Strada gently removes the heavily infected valve.
Clarissa Ward: Can you see already how bad the damage is? Gino Strada: Yes, extremely bad, extremely bad.
God knows how they survive in these conditions.
He carefully positions the artificial valve and then stitch by stitch, secures it firmly in place.
Gino Strada: OK, flow down.
Hunter: OK, flow's down.
The operator of the bypass machine begins restoring the blood flow to the heart.
Clarissa Ward: Now the heart is about to start beating for itself again? Gino Strada: Hopefully.
Clarissa Ward: Hopefully.
Gino Strada: OK, stop.
Hunter: Pump's off.
Gino Strada: Cannula is out.
Clarissa Ward: Is that the hardest part over? Gino Strada: Yeah.
Sufiatu will spend the next few days in an intensive care unit.
Even if the operation is successful she will rely on Emergency for drugs and medical care for the rest of her life.
But that still beats the alternative.
Clarissa Ward: Without this surgery, how long could she have survived? Gino Strada: Well, from one day to three months.
Clarissa Ward: But not longer than three months? Gino Strada: No.
Clarissa Ward: So how many heart surgeries have you done? Gino Strada: Well, at this center, I think we did slightly over 5,000.
Clarissa Ward: But you personally in your life? Gino Strada: Oh, I didn't count, but I do it every day.
Clarissa Ward: So thousands? Gino Strada: Yeah, I'm basically a surgical animal, you know, that's the only thing I can do.
He's been doing it for decades.
After medical school he trained at Stanford and Pittsburgh Universities before joining the Red Cross to become, as he calls it, a war surgeon.
But he felt that he could do more.
So he started Emergency, a small organization devoted to the treatment of victims of war that quickly became known for going where other groups don't.
Clarissa Ward: Emergency has a reputation for pushing the envelope, for pushing right onto the front lines.
Is that necessary? Gino Strada: Well, it is.
Because that's where the most wounded are.
But to get to the frontlines, Emergency works closely with some of the world's darkest regimes including, here in Sudan, notorious President Omar al Bashir who has been indicted for war crimes.
The small organization Dr.
Strada started countries and, at 65, Dr.
Strada now lives at the Salaam Center full-time.
At eight o'clock every morning he sits down to discuss the day's cases.
Today, the first patient under his knife will be Mariata, the first little girl we met in Sierra Leone.
As Dr.
Strada prepared to perform the secular magic of open heart surgery, Mariata's mother Esther led the Sierra Leone group in prayer, singing to God to steady the surgeon's hand.
[Esther, singing: I heard about youI heard about you.]
[Clarissa Ward: Look at that, wow.
.]
The operation was a success.
Clarissa Ward: Does it feel good to see it start beating again? Gino Strada: Yes, much better than the opposite.
Believe me.
Mariata is one of the fortunate few.
She won't share the fate of hundreds of thousands of children who die of this disease each year.
Clarissa Ward: How do you choose the small handful that get flown over here for this state of the art treatment? Gino Strada: It's just a matter of coincidences.
Clarissa Ward: But in a sense, you choose who lives and who doesn't? Gino Strada: You know, every time you say yes to someone, you are automatically say no to somebody else.
We can perform 1,500 operations per year, so we can distribute We went to the ward to see how one of those winners, Sufiatu, was doing.
Clarissa Ward: Pick which ones you wantthe pink hearts? You can't go wrong with pink hearts, right? She was making a remarkable recovery.
And just a week after they arrived, she, Mariata and all the other kids from Sierra Leone were back on their feet.
They were, quite simply, reborn in the operating room.
Gino Strada: It's a disease where the young, the kids, the teenagers, pay the highest price.
We are trying to do the small things that we can do.
And we know it's a drop in the ocean.
Salmon is the most popular fish on American dinner plates, but most of it is no longer fished out of the sea.
Close to three quarters of our salmon is farmed - grown in cages suspended in the open ocean in places like South America, Europe and Canada.
It's a multibillion dollar industry now, but many environmental organizations are concerned these farms could be spreading diseases into the wild.
And they've issued a red-label warning for farmed salmon, urging consumers to avoid buying the product because of its potential environmental impact.
Salmon farmers say the industry has improved over the years, and they're actually helping to save the last remaining wild salmon in the sea.
into the wild.
And they've issued a red-label warning for farmed salmon, urging consumers to avoid buying the product because of its potential environmental impact.
Salmon farmers say the industry has improved over the years, and they're actually helping to save the last remaining wild salmon in the sea.
Ian Roberts: So we're arriving to the farm now.
Sanjay Gupta: That's it, right? Ian Roberts: Yeah, yeah.
Ian Roberts has been farming salmon in Canada for more than 20 years.
He works for Marine Harvest.
They're the biggest salmon farming company in the world, and he took us to see one of their farms in British Columbia.
Sanjay Gupta: Pretty spectacular.
Ian Roberts: This is the office.
This farm is about 150 miles north of Vancouver.
Sanjay Gupta: When you come out here, it is so beautiful.
And the argument is that these farms threaten the pristine nature of this beauty.
Is that a fair argument? Ian Roberts: No.
While there is a local impact, and let's be honest, when you farm anything, whether it's vegetables or animals on land, you have an impact.
But you're also taking pressure off wild stocks.
By raising fish in the ocean, we're actually conserving what we have left in the ocean.
What's left in the ocean is in trouble.
The number of wild salmon in both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans has been on a steady decline over the past century while the demand for salmon just keeps rising.
So Ian Roberts says he sees it as almost his duty to farm fish.
Ian Roberts: We farm everything we eat.
All our vegetables are farmed.
All our meats are farmed.
The ocean is the last place where we hunted and gathered.
The problem is there is seven billion of us now on this planet.
And the oceans can't give us any more fish.
We owe it to our oceans to make sure that we're providing an alternate to just capturing the last wild fish.
Marine Harvest owns about 30 farms just like this one in British Columbia.
Each farm is about the size of a couple football fields, built in calm ocean inlets where farmed salmon can thrive.
Ian Roberts: Here, I'll get you just to grab his tail there and see how he kicks.
Sanjay Gupta: OK.
Am I being hazed? Is that what that was? Ian Roberts: That's exactly what it is.
Ian Roberts: That's a nice lookin' fish.
While these fish appear normal Sanjay Gupta: You're free, into the pen.
the environment they live in is anything but normal.
Salmon - which are naturally white in color - get their pink color from eating shrimp and other creatures in the wild that have chemicals called carotenoids.
Sanjay Gupta: So this is the feed? Let's talk a look.
These farmed salmon get synthetic versions of the chemical added to their food - which give them that classic pink color consumers expect.
Ian Roberts: We can adjust the amount of carotenoids in the diet to adjust the color.
(Alarm sound) Ian Roberts: That's the oxygen alarm.
Sanjay Gupta: So does that mean the oxygen has just gone down-- Ian Roberts: Too low, yeah.
Sanjay Gupta: Is that a limitation of a farm? Because if they were in the wild, they would swim deeper or go to a different place.
Ian Roberts: Sure.
Yeah, you need to manage the environment where your animals live.
That's farming.
Each of these pens holds 60,000 fish, and one of the concerns about these farms is that this tight concentration can lead to otherwise harmless viruses mutating into superbugs, and then spreading.
Sanjay Gupta: One of the things that happens in humans is if they live in close quarters, what might otherwise be a relatively harmless infection can spread very quickly.
Is that an issue here? Ian Roberts: Well, we have to be aware of that because it is intensive culture.
It is something that we take into consideration.
So farmers vaccinate salmon against known viruses but the vaccines don't always work.
Every year there are outbreaks on salmon farms, and some scientists are concerned those diseases could spread to wild salmon.
Alexandra Morton: Salmon farming cannot be done in the ocean in net pens without destroying the environment around it.
That's a strong statement, but it's one Alexandra Morton, a prominent environmental activist and scientist, has been trying to prove for the past two decades.
Sanjay Gupta: The idea of farming is something that most people are familiar with, cows and chickens and things like that.
Why should salmon farming be different? Alexandra Morton: These are not farms.
These are feed lots.
They're growing as many animals as possible, as fast as possible, in as small a space as possible.
What worries her is what happened five years ago, when salmon farms in Chile made news [CBS News report: In Chile's Northern Patagonia, the salmon are dying.]
A highly communicable, and deadly, virus called Infectious Salmon Anemia, or ISA, broke out on the farms in Chile, and wiped out most of the farmed salmon there.
Alexandra Morton: The story in Chile's interesting because the virus they think got in there they were kinda fooling around with it.
Maybe it's here.
Maybe it's not.
No, it's not here.
And then whammo, the thing just ignited.
Sanjay Gupta: How bad did it get in Chile and how bad could it get here? Alexandra Morton: They could not believe how many fish it killed.
It caused $2 billion of damage.
But they don't have wild salmon.
Nobody knows what's gonna happen here.
This salmon farming experiment, this is the only place it's going on amongst abundant wild salmon.
Here we are risking everything on this coast.
So Morton tests wild salmon in British Columbia for the virus, ISA - the one that caused so much trouble in Chile.
Sanjay Gupta: What are you looking for right now? Alexandra Morton: Right now I'm looking for a freshly dead fish.
She combs the riverbanks for wild salmon that are dying during the natural spawning cycle.
She's looking for evidence of viruses she believes are being passed from farmed salmon to the wild fish.
Alexandra Morton: You open up a fish and it's like a book.
Sanjay Gupta: This-- I mean, you're doing an autopsy? Alexandra Morton: I am doing an autopsy, yes.
She sends off tissue samples to labs around the world, including the one that diagnosed the problem in Chile.
Alexandra Morton: And let's see what the liver looks like.
So far her tests have shown genetic markers for the ISA virus - indication, she says, that the virus is already present in these waters.
Sanjay Gupta: There are salmon farmers who will say, "Look-- these viruses don't cause a problem.
There's a difference between the presence of a virus and infection and a fish actually getting sick.
And it's important to distinguish these things?" Alexandra Morton: Yes.
They have no idea.
There's nobody actually looking at the wild fish carefully.
So that remains an open question.
Sanjay Gupta: So we don't know for sure that they're causing a problem.
But we don't know that they're not? Alexandra Morton: That's right.
So we're gambling.
Sanjay Gupta: One of the things you hear is that these fish could have an impact on the wild fish that swim through this area.
Why not just put these farms somewhere where they're not in that kind of proximity? Ian Roberts: We have relocated farms over the past, identifying that they're not in the best areas, perhaps and they're in sensitive habitat.
But I don't believe that aquaculture in British Columbia is having an effect on the wild fish.
If it was, I wouldn't be a part of the business.
Farmers and environmentalists have their differences, but Ian Roberts acknowledges Alexandra Morton's role in raising legitimate concerns about the effect on ecosystem in the early days of salmon farming.
Sanjay Gupta: Wow, look at-- that's-- that's so beautiful.
While dolphins and other sea mammals may be a stunning part of this landscape they can be a nuisance to salmon farms, stealing fish and damaging nets.
So, Morton says, the farms used to blast loud sounds under water to scare the mammals away.
Alexandra Morton: Humpback whale.
Sanjay Gupta: Just like that! But those devices could hurt the animals, and they disrupted migratory patterns of some whales.
Alexandra Morton: There she goes.
Sanjay Gupta: There's the tail.
In response to pressure from Morton and other environmentalists, the farms stopped using the underwater noise devices and instead built better fences around the farms.
Ian Roberts: Seals and sea lions have been a problem in the past.
But the technology we use today and the thickness of the nets and the way we anchor the nets really keeps them away from the farm.
This farm hasn't had any issues.
Sanjay Gupta: I'm curious, you've got 600,000 fish.
What does it look like below here? Ian Roberts: It looks like a muddy bottom, but it's got nutrients on top, which is the fish waste.
Sanjay Gupta: I've heard the term "dead zone.
" It's called the-- that doesn't sound good when you hear "dead zone" underneath these farms.
Is that a fair assessment? Ian Roberts: No.
No, not at all.
There's-- added nutrients below the farms.
Added nutrients bring in life.
Prawns come to the farm to feed on those nutrients.
But there is an impact to the bottom of the ocean, but that's only temporary.
Farms are sometimes left fallow between harvests because studies show the impact to the bottom of the ocean can be significant - with trace metals and organic waste polluting the ocean floor.
Morton says it can take years for the ocean bottom to recover, and she took us outside a fallowed farm to show us what it looks like below.
She dropped a special underwater camera 300 feet down.
Sanjay Gupta: So, what do we have? Alexandra Morton: You see the brown waste of the farm.
Sanjay Gupta: So, that mushy, spongy stuff -- is that just an accumulation or layer of waste? Alexandra Morton: That is farmed salmon poop.
There are 125 salmon farms along the coastline of British Columbia, and the Canadian government plans to allow more.
But just up the coast, in Alaska, salmon farms simply don't exist.
George Eliason: There's no room for farmed salmon in Alaska.
George Eliason is a third generation fisherman in Alaskawhich has the largest wild salmon fishery in the world.
Twenty-five years ago, Alaska banned salmon farming out of concern that the farming industry could harm the lucrative fishing trade.
Eliason's father was the state senator who drafted the legislation to outlaw salmon farming.
Sanjay Gupta: What was the concern back then? George Eliason: Disease.
Pollution.
Sanjay Gupta: The concerns that your father had about what it might do to the wild salmon population, was he right? George Eliason: He was right.
We've got a great fishery up there now.
Why take the chance? Why even try it? Instead of farming fish, the Alaskan government set up hatcheries where young salmon are grown and then released - not into cages - but into the wild to boost the population of wild salmon in the ocean.
George Eliason: We call it ocean ranching.
Sanjay Gupta: Should they still be called wild salmon or has that become a misnomer at this point? George Eliason: They're wild.
They're wild.
Ocean ranching, combined with careful regulations, has created a thriving wild salmon population in Alaska, a stark contrast to the situation in western Canada.
In 2009, when sockeye salmon numbers on a major river in British Columbia hit a historic low, the Canadian government launched an ambitious two-year-long Commission to finally explore the causes of the decline.
Brian Wallace, senior counsel to the Commission, says they examined more than a half million documents, including Alexandra Morton's research.
Sanjay Gupta: She makes a claim that ISA virus has been found in the waters and the fish of British Columbia.
Is that true? Brian Wallace: I don't know whether that's true or not.
Sanjay Gupta: How can we not know if that's true? I mean, we're not talking about opinion or conjecture; we're talking about science here.
Male voice: We don't have the answer.
Sanjay Gupta: You looked at 600,000 documents, and you spent $26 million.
We should have some sort of answer here, shouldn't we? Brian Wallace: This is a very complex subject.
Somebody said, you know, "This isn't rocket scientist-- science, it's much more complicated than that.
" Sanjay Gupta: So we don't know that the virus is not here, and we don't know if it is here? Brian Wallace: I think that's correct.
The Commission determined that climate change and other environmental factors were likely causes of the decline in wild salmon in western Canada, but said disease transmission from farms could be a factor as well.
So the Commission recommended a moratorium on any new farms built along the most sensitive sockeye salmon migration routes and it gave farmers eight years to prove there was no significant risk of passing viruses to wild fish.
Sanjay Gupta: It sounds like until the virus actually gets out of these farms and into the wild population that's gonna establish the risk.
Brian Wallace: That's one way to establish it.
Sanjay Gupta: That sounds like it'd be too late.
Brian Wallace: I hope not.