town officials are against it. we'll have more stories at the top of the hour. i'm alina cho. thanks for joining us. first, "sanjay gupta m.d." begins right now. good morning and thanks for joining us. i'm dr. sanjay gupta on assignment here in san francisco. concussions and kids. it's a topic we cover quite a bit here on "sgmd." something we're very serious about. i want to tell you about a story about an agonizing decision one family had to make to try and help others. also, the hunt for a new killer virus. it's taking place right now in central africa. and that data is being analyzed here in san francisco. we'll explain. and also, another story that we've talked quite a bit about is about cell phones and radiation. here in san francisco, starting this month, these flyers like this will need to be handed out and on display in stores. take a look. cell phones emit radio-frequency energy. you'll start seeing those here in san francisco along with

specific tips on what to do including limiting cell phone use by children, using a headset, using belt clips, avoiding cell phones in weak signal areas. this is something, again, we've been reporting on for some time. concern that using a cell phone for too long, too many years could potentially problematic to your health. the world health organization even weighing in on this earlier this year saying they now consider cell phone radiation the nonionizing radiation a plausible carcinogen, something that could cause cancer. at least here in san francisco, you'll see flyers like this for some time to come. so exactly how do we best protect kids from head injuries, especially head injuries related to sports? scientists are making incredible headway trying to link these hits on football fields, for example, with mood swings, with depression, with even suicide. something that we've talked about quite a bit. there is a signature injury. and we're starting to see it in people younger and younger. but here's the problem. we don't know exactly how common

this injury is because as things stand now, it can only be diagnosed after death. >> reporter: chronic and tract encephalopathy, it's a progressive disease. >> it spreads throughout the nervous system with aging, and i think we're starting to match up clinical symptoms with the amount of spread in the brain. >> reporter: dr. ann mckee has made it her life's mission to understand why some players are susceptible to cte, and others are not. she's a director of the vacste brain bank. it's a joint project between the veterans administration and western university. you're starting to see some of those same types of changes in people that are younger as a result of -- >> of repetitive trauma to the brain. it's not the same distribution. and it doesn't affect the same parts of the brain, but we do see some characteristic shrinkage. >> reporter: what we're seeing here, is this definitely caused by blows to the head? >> it's never been seen in any

reported case except in a case of repeated blows to the head. >> reporter: i think the remarkable thing is how early in life some of these changes can start to take place. what's the youngest that you've seen some of these early signs of what people are calling cte or sort of a dementia-like thing? >> the youngest case to date is a 17-year-old. >> reporter: the brain of nathan styles. >> which is nathan styles, right. >> reporter: for nathan styles, 2010 was supposed to be his year. the 17-year-old senior from spring hill, kansas, was the star running back for his high school football team. he was also a starter on the varsity basketball team. >> if you would watch him run, he had a flow about him that was just beautiful. i mean, it looked so graceful. >> he was an athlete, but school was more important. his grades and a future and a family and he just had his priorities right. >> reporter: on friday, october 1st, 2010.

>> the 2010 homecoming king is -- nathan stiles. >> reporter: the spring hill brncos lost that game. >> the next day he told me he had a headache. and i said, oh, really? he said oh, yeah, i think i just got knocked around. i'm, like, okay. and i got a call that wednesday, that following wednesday from the trainer at school saying nathan's telling me he's still having headaches. you need to go take him to the emergency room. so i did. had a cat scan. nothing. >> reporter: despite a clean ct scan, the doctor kept nathan out of play for three weeks. >> i remember him looking at me and he goes, "mom, are you okay with this?" and i'm, like, "well, no, but it's his choice."

you though, it's his choice. nathan, you want to play? yeah, i'm all right. yeah. i've only got, you know, two games left. i'm going to play. so he did. >> reporter: he took a hit that next game. but he seemed to be fine. nathan played the final game of the broncos' season the following week. and just before halftime as nathan went to intercept the ball, another hit. >> he collapsed on the sideline. and the coaches were telling me to, you know, try to get -- wake him up. try to wake him up. then i heard him say "he's seige you aring," and that was it. they took him in the ambulance. we waited for lifeflight. and everything went bad from there. from bad to worse. >> reporter: nathan's brain hemorrhaged significantly, and his doctors could not save him. nathan died of second-impact syndrome, a condition that

occurs when a player is hit again too soon after a concussion. it primarily impacts younger athletes like nathan. >> if there's anything that needs to be learned -- if there's anything we can do to keep somebody's family from getting involved in what happened to us, we'd love to help do that. >> you know, he was just an amazing young man who just loved the play of sports, and unfortunately had some fairly minor injuries that most likely resulted in his death. >> reporter: i have kids as well. i think the hard part is, you know, you hear that. you hear that relatively minor injuries, healthy kid. and then he dies. >> right. >> reporter: and i think the question for a lot of parents is what's the message to me? >> the message is, you know, take care of your head. don't play with your head. play smart. play safe. and if you do get a head injury, even if it's really mild, you take care of that injury. >> reporter: just incredibly tough decisions that families are trying to make every single

day. they're literally asking that very question. and sometimes they don't like the answers they always get. one of the things we're working on is trying to figure out, can high school teams play safer and still win? it's a national movement. in fact, i'm flying from here to north carolina to try and answer that very question. i'll have a series of reports on this and also a full documentary next year. an interesting headline there right here in the golden state, children under the age of 18 can no longer use a tanning bed even with their parents' permission. a bit of a controversial decision. and california is the first state to do it. but they're doing it because of the concerns obviously about cancer. now, it is worth pointing out remembering at this point that ultraviolet light is the real culprit, whether it comes from natural sunlight or from a tanning bed because it is tanning itself that poses the risk. we're going to take a short break. but when we come back, we're going to discuss this controversial new recommendation that men no longer get a psa test for prostate cancer screening. not everyone agrees with this.

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now a story that we first broke here on cnn involving one of the most common screening tests for cancer in the world today. it's called the psa test, prostate-specific antigen test. a federal task force basically says don't do it. it could cause more harm than good. these recommendations came as a surprise to many people out there, especially in the cancer community. so to sort of dive into this a little bit deeper, we're joined by two doctors, both from the university of california-san francisco. the first who is a professor, doctor of medicine, epidemiology and statistics and also dr. pete

carroll who chairs the urology department right here in san francisco. dr. carroll, let me start with you. obviously a lot of news about the psa test. the message people seem to be taking is that it could do more harm than good. and that really no one should be getting it on a regular basis. what do you say to that news, first of all, those recommendations? >> i think the first part may be accurate for some patients. i think the second part to abandon psa testing will set us back. we've seen a 40% reduction in prostate cancer mortality in the past two decades. i don't think we want to go backwards. i think ending psa testing completely is the wrong thing to do. >> reporter: in your practice, will you still order the test? >> yes. i'll order it in well-informed patients who are at risk for the disease. the other important thing is if they're found to have prostate cancer, we will treat selectively. that is that one of the big achilles heels of psa testing is that you identify some cancers

from not needing to be treated. in this country they're often treated. that is the down side. we need to stop that. we need to use the testing more intelligently. >> reporter: instead of abandoning the test completely as dr. carroll suggesting, being smarter about it, not completely linking diagnosis and treatment, figuring out who needs to be treated. >> yeah, that's a great point. the thing -- the job of the task force was to look at our current practice of using psa screening in healthy men without symptoms and to evaluate the evidence of whether there's reduced mortality after we screen in this fashion. and what we found was that there wasn't evidence for reductions in deaths as a result of the screening. and, in fact, the harms that come from overdiagnosis and from overtreatment, as peter said, outweigh the benefits that don't seem to be in existence in screening all men. >> reporter: i want to be sure that i'm clear on this, though, because dr. carroll, you mentioned 40% reduction in

mortality over the past couple of decades. it says no reduction due to psa testing. what was the reduction due to over the last 20 years? >> i think in my opinion that clear evidence that psa does save lives. one could argue what that benefit is. i think well-conducted studies will show that. i think it's in part due to early detection and in part due to improved treatment. so i think in combination, we've lower mortality rates. the reduction has accounted for 20% of the global reduction in cancer deaths in men. again, i don't think we want to go back there. >> reporter: well, stay tuned, right? i think we're going to add to the public discussion, as you requested. doctor, thanks so much. dr. carroll, appreciate it. thank you. >> thank you. >> reporter: now, i may remember i was in this film called "contagion." it was about a pandemic that sweeps the planet. unsettling movie for sure. a little frightening. but you're about to meet a scientist who's made it his life's work to try and bee vent that exact scenario from happening. we first met in the jungles of

africa, nathan wolfe. he's coming up. first in this week's "food for life," brain food. you are what you eat. and that's especially true in the brain. which is mostly made up of fatty tissue. no surprise, then, research shows that healthy brain function is linked to a healthy mix of fats in your diet. crucial to that mix, omega 3 fatty acids. at least one military study showed levels that are too low are tied to depression, even higher suicide rates. so the question is, how do you get enough? well, the best source by far is seafood. salmon is a good one. sardines as well. if you hate fish, this are eggs with omega 3s added. of course, you can always take a supplement. that's food for life. i'm phil mickelson, pro golfer.

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we are back with "sgmd." i'm on assignment here in san francisco. here's probably no city that's had such a link between technology being used to solve these old problems using new ideas and new techniques. it's true in many fields including medicine. and specifically infectious diseases. the man you're about to meet, well, he does his work here. of course, he's not here right now. he's touring the country promoting "the viral storm oicht nathan wolfe joins me from new york. there are so many new pathogens out there. and it's striking, just this week we heard about 43,000 -- i'm reading here -- 43,381 new viruses researchers found. we really only have sort of looked more closely at fewer than 10,000 of them. what does that mean that there are so many more pathogens being discovered? >> i mean, part of what this

means is we have new technology available. so if you look back even 20, 30 years ago, all we had was culture. now we have these incredible new genomic technologies that allow us to take a specimen, maybe a swab of swin from my hand, maybe it's a drop of water. to really get a sense of the viruses present in those kinds of specimens. that's going to change the way we can detect them early and predict and prevent future pandemics. >> you and i have spent time traveling around the world including cameroon, for example. you spent time there looking at some of the chatter i believe you called it of these pathogens going back and forth between animals and humans. your research, obviously, has been in this area for some time.

are there constant leaps from animals to humans that could be problematic? >> yeah. and some of it is things are changing. right? so all of these pandemics ultimately originate in animals as have the majority of human diseases in history and as sort of roads go further out and more contact with the animals more and more viruses jump in to us but perhaps even more important is interconnected nature of our planet so the way that airlines and ships really connect human populations mean that -- in the sort of blink of an eye a virus from sen tall africa or southeast asia or a sa could make its way anywhere on the planet and that's what we have to really be concerned with. >> i don't know if you saw this. there's a recent movie "contagion" that talked about this sort of this idea in an area of global travel. you're one of the guys trying to keep us safe, i think, providing more information. that's part of what your shop

does here in san francisco. can you tell us about it? so, what is the shop doing here in san francisco and relate to places like africa? >> yeah. no. and as you may know i was one of the advisers on "contagion." it was a really interesting exercise and what we do in san francisco is we are sort of the prequell if you will to "contagion." our objective is to try to stop these viruses before they get to a pandemic stage so if we do our job right, movies or real-life scenarios won't have to happen. >> so what would happen instead? so you have this shop, monitoring chatter. what happens next? how do you prevent the pandemic from occurring? it seems to happen so quickly or could happen so quickly. >> yeah. no. and it just depends on the nature of the pandemic. yes, it is all about early detection and thinking about

early detection it is like compounding interest. sort of the earlier you detect something, the more lives you save in the long run. just in the same way that compounding interest, you start saving early, you get more money at the end and this is basically -- this is what we're all about and whether it's sort of digital surveillance with digital tools, monitoring the movement of these viruses from animals to humans in 20 or some sites we work with around the world. our job is to catch these. we are obviously linked very closely with organizations like partners at cdc, usid and w.h.o. where we participate so the idea to try to trigger these but historically we have been very good or tried really hard at responding. the real question is can we move towards prediction like heart disease? that's where we're trying to go. >> that's fascinating.

i'm glad you're around doing the work you're doing. hopefully it keeps us safer. congratulations on the book. i'll try to keep things under control for you in san francisco while you are away. beautiful spot. thank you so much for joining us. next up, a chef with no stomach. we'll explain right after the break. taking more medication, so we see people suffering from dry mouth more so. we may see more cavities, bad breath, oral irritation. a dry mouth sufferer doesn't have to suffer. i would recommend biotene. the enzymes in biotene products help supplement enzymes that are naturally in saliva. biotene helps moisten those areas that have become dry. those that are suffering can certainly benefit from biotene.

[ guy ] ring, ring. progresso... i love your new loaded potato with bacon. that's what we like to hear. ring, ring. progresso... ...switch our phone service? ...no, i think we're pretty happy with our phones. [ male announcer ] progresso. you gotta taste this soup. a lot of houses have more than one cookbook, right? i think we have several. i think the less you cook the more books you buy. but this book is written by a chef while he was in the hospital being treated for cancer of his stomach. his name is chef hans ruford and the whole thing changed

everything about him, including how he eats. hans is a chef without a stomach or much of an esophagus. >> i have had 11 surgeries in the last 6 years. >> he was diagnosed with gastric cancer weeks after appearing in the 2005 season of the next food network star. >> there was a tumor at the junction. >> the treatment was painful. ruford had half the stomach and most of the esophagus removed immediately after the diagnosis and then more surgeries. he was cancer free. that's when the headaches began. >> i saw 10 to 12 lesions and told this is it. you're on your way out. >> it wasn't cancer but it was a serious brain infection called but the newly constructed digestion system. >> i ended up springing a leak at the junction where it was connected and that leak actually

almost killed me. >> antibiotics got rid of the infection but a year later, a second one, worse than the first. both infections were so serious that doctors didn't want to risk him getting get another one so in march of this year, the rest of his stomach was removed. even to the stomach is gone, he eats six healthy small meals a day. >> the expression you are what you eat is so, you know, it's cliche as can be and because it's true and for me that really is amplified. >> he wrote a cookbook while in the hospital after the first operation and for the last five years he's been teaching fellow survivors how to incorporate healthy cancer fighting foods in to their diets. >> it's power and energy and it's energy that our bodies can readily assimilate. >> he says the six years have been difficult but being open about his cancer and surrounding himself with family and friends helped him overcome every