stick around. "sanjay gupta md" is with you next. hi there, i'm brooke baldwin, sanjay will be here in just a couple of minutes. first, a major update on a story we've been following for you for years. tim josephs joined the army when he was just 18 years of age. fresh faced, idealistic and he says they made him into a human guinea pig. he says it made him sick, and ever since he's been running into a brick wall trying to get some kind of help. sanjay tells us how his whole story started. >> reporter: tim josephs was just 18 years old when he joined the u.s. army. it was the height of the vietnam war. >> most of my friends were drafted. and i felt a duty to serve. >> reporter: but shortly after enlisting, josephs was chosen to

participate in a two-month program at edgewood arsenal military base. >> this is edgewood arsenal the army's chemical commodities center. >> reporter: this was the cold war and the united states wanted defenses against a possible soviet chemical attack. >> psychochemical attack may come in the form of an explosion. an invisible vapor. a cloud of smoke. we do not know -- >> reporter: the u.s. was also developing psychochemical weapons of its own. >> here's a group of normal soldiers responding correctly to a series of routine drill commands. after receiving a small dose of lsd, they're confused and undisciplined. >> reporter: for 20 years about 7,000 military volunteers took part in testing of some 250 chemical and biological agents. >> one test i woke up and demonstrated parkinson's symptoms. i couldn't walk.

my body shook violently and pain throughout my body. and just a lot of numbness. >> reporter: ten years ago, he was diagnosed with parkinson's disease. >> the symptoms that -- that i felt then are just exactly what's come back to me in the last ten years. >> reporter: so josephs and other edgewood vets are suing the department of defense and the department of veterans affairs. in response to a cnn report on edgewood in 2012, dod said, "the department of defense has made it a priority to identify all service members exposed to chemical and biological substances and the va's contacted and offered free medical evaluations to thousands of veterans." but today josephs finds himself facing another struggle. his parkinson's forced him to retire early, and in 2010, he filed a medical claim with the va. >> i have a hard time really

dressing myself and traveling. and i have attacks daily of tremors and sometimes breathing difficulty and eating. >> reporter: 13 months later, he was awarded a 40% disability rating. that's $602 a month not even enough to pay for his medications, so he appealed. asking for more. but this february after three years of waiting and unanswered letters, tim got unwelcome news from the va office in pittsburgh. >> i should call back in about four years. that by that time i'd be much closer to my file being looked at. and i was speechless. >> reporter: that's right. tim says it would be 2018 before the va could make a decision on his case. i was surprised. but several lawyers we spoke with who handle disability claims say they aren't. >> many veterans, 275,000 as of

this week, are waiting an average of four to five years for an answer on an appealed disability claim. va's treatment of these veterans is absolutely unacceptable. >> and here he is joining me now tim josephs with me in washington. tim, just listening to your story and hearing in the piece that the va told you, sorry, we'll make a decision in four years. tell me about a phone call you just recently got. >> i just got a call this morning that my benefits have been increased 50% from 40% to 80% disability rating. and i'd sure like to thank everyone here at cnn for their work. without your help and intervention, i'd still be in line with 100,000 other vets sort of lost. >> it's incredible. i mean, hats off to sanjay and

his entire medical team for maybe playing a role, but we're so happy for you that you're finally going to get some help. i understand, tim, you're supposed to have brain surgery, deep brain stimulation to treat your parkinson's. you've been waiting a while for that. do we have a date yet? >> well, i was scheduled for mid-july. and it's sort of on hold now. several new drugs have come out to treat. so, the doctors want to research that venue first. as there's some risk involved with the -- with the brain stimulation surgery. so, they'll try the newer drugs first. and then ultimately i'll most likely have that at some date in the future. >> well, whether it's the drugs or that, that surgery, we wish you absolutely the best, tim josephs, and we're thrilled you got the phone call that seemed to turn things around. thank you for sharing your story with us. >> my sincere thanks to cnn.

i really appreciate it. >> you got it. and now millions of veterans rely on va hospitals and in many ways the care is excellent. but it's a tough time. not just delays on these disability claims but cnn's drew griffin broke the story that made so many vets who have been waiting for months and months, even for years, for treatment. and some patients died as a result. whistle-blowers accuse some va centers of falsifying records and covering it up, but thanks to that reporting here at cnn the head of the va had to answer some pretty tough questions on thursday on capitol hill. >> is in your judgment based on what you know, are people, quote-unquote, cooking the books? is that, in fact, a problem within the health care system? >> i'm not aware, and other than a number of isolated cases where there is evidence of that.

but the fact that there is evidence in a couple of cases behooves us to go and take a thorough look. >> and i can promise you cnn will stay on top of this story. in other news a disease called middle east respiratory syndrome, has put a lot of people on edge, it kills about a third of known patients. nearly all of them were infected in saudi arabia. but some have flown to the united states. the cdc and local health officials are tracking down hundreds of people who were on those multiple airplanes with these individuals, and senior medical correspondent elizabeth cohen has a look behind the scenes. >> reporter: we're here at the cdc's emergency operations center. it's the nerve center where they're tracking the mers virus. off to my right there are people who are making phone calls to passengers on the plane with the mers patient in florida. they want to know, did anyone else get sick. on this monitor a map displays the 34 states where the passengers live.

>> we are basically trying to reach everybody. we're administering a short questionnaire that you have here, making sure they're well. >> reporter: so, what kind of questions are you asking? >> have you had a fever? that's a temperature greater than 100.4. have you had any cough? >> reporter: the passengers are likely not sick. they didn't have close and prolonged contact with the mers patient. most at risk family members and health care workers. that's why this box was rushed here. it contains specimens from health care workers who came in contact with the mers patient. that box of specimens arrived here at the cdc's viral disease lab. now, we're not allowed in because this is bio-safety hazard level two and that means no visitors. but all day inside here, they worked on two mers specimens from florida. so, two people fly from the middle east to the united states and bring mers here. and look at the response that it generates.

>> we're all connected. a single plane flight can bring a virus or bacteria from any part of the world to any other part of the world. >> elizabeth cohen with that behind-the-scenes look there. a couple of things you might notice if you do fly, airports are starting to post signs like this one, a warning about mers. basically if you are not on the arabian peninsula, you don't have to worry about it. but if you do travel there and within two weeks you start to notice some symptoms like a fever, cough, shortness of breath, don't blow it off. do tell your doctor. they will make sure that it isn't serious. coming up here, one of the more controversial diseases. surprisingly lyme disease. going places it never has gone before. sanjay's got the details up next. healthcare you deserve. at humana, we believe if healthcare changes, if it becomes simpler... if frustration and paperwork decrease... if grandparents get to live at home instead of in a home... the gap begins to close. so let's simplify things. let's close the gap between people and care.

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i did not know what it was like to be a non-smoker. but i do now. ask your doctor if chantix is right for you. you may have heard recently scientists issued a new report on climate change that went to the president and congress. what caught my eye about this was the predicted impact on human health. for one thing it says warmer temperatures will mean more mosquitos and ticks and also more of the illnesses that they carry. you can already see this with lyme disease. kerry clark is hunting. >> that's how we do it. look, there's a tick there already. >> hunting ticks. tracing the carriers of lyme disease. >> this is not a black-legged tick. it looks almost exactly like a black-legged tick. >> four years ago he felt a bite. >> five days later i had this strange fatigue and some general malaise, and i had these swollen lymph nodes on the side of my neck.

>> the diagnosis, lyme disease. the centers for disease control estimates that every year there are approximately 300,000 cases. it says 95% of those occur in just 13 states, all of them in the northeast and the upper midwest. >> deer ticks exist in southern states. they don't really bite humans like the northern ones do, so there may be other factors why even though the deer ticks exist in southern states and some of them even carry the bacteria that causes lyme disease, we don't see many cases of human lyme disease. >> but clark was exploring in georgia when he was bitten and he says there's plenty of evidence lyme is not so rare in the south. >> over time it's just kind of being self-reinforced that we don't have it here, it's rare to nonexistent in the south and

this sort of thing. and then doctors were educated and indoctrinated into that belief. and so even when they see it, they don't recognize it. >> other experts are starting to agree. lyme disease is spreading. >> but lyme disease does occur in many other states. so, the question is not whether lyme disease exists in the southeast or the south central united states, it certainly does. the question is, how much of a public health problem is it. >> scientists believe the disease will keep moving south, in part because of the changes in climate. >> they send me my data files. >> clark's doctor put him on a course of antibiotics and his symptoms did go away, but they came back just two months later. >> one day i developed a headache, and it was a migraine severity-type headache. it came on immediately, and it stayed for three weeks. i had pressure in my head, neck stiffness and other things like that. >> while a majority of patients with lyme disease see their symptoms go away after an initial course of antibiotics,

another 10% to 20% have symptoms that linger. some like clark end up taking antibiotics for months at a time. >> when carefully studied where antibiotics long term have been compared to placebo we don't see any effect. >> the cdc told us the lasting symptoms are real but they're probably due to nerve damage not a lingering infection. but others say that issue isn't settled. >> we also know from animal models that there are situations when the pathogen, the lyme bacterium, does persist, so i think that the potential for the lyme disease pathogen to persist following standard antibiotic treatment is reasonably high, and it probably is occurring in some lyme disease patients. >> clark is hoping the answer may lie in some of these ticks he's rounding up. that understanding them better could spare patients all over a lot more pain. and how to protect yourself from

ticks. use insect repellent. when hiking wear long pants and sleeves and walk in the center of the trail. you know all that, right? up next, forget the 10,000-hour rule. how you can learn the basics of any new skill in 20 hours or even less. i have low testosterone. there, i said it. how did i know? well, i didn't really. see, i figured low testosterone would decrease my sex drive... but when i started losing energy and became moody... that's when i had an honest conversation with my doctor. we discussed all the symptoms... then he gave me some blood tests. showed it was low t. that's it. it was a number -- not just me. [ male announcer ] today, men with low t have androgel 1.62% testosterone gel. the #1 prescribed topical testosterone replacement therapy, increases testosterone when used daily.

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what is this place? where are we? this is where we bring together reliably fast internet and the best in entertainment. we call it the x1 entertainment operating system. it looks like the future! we must have encountered a temporal vortex. further analytics are necessary. beam us up. ♪ that's my phone. hey. [ female announcer ] the x1 entertainment operating system. only from xfinity. tv and internet together like never before. there's a wildly popular book "outliers," there's the case made that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at something. that's about 1200 days, 3 1/2 years, 10,000 hours. we decided to invite josh

kaufman, the author of the first 20 hours "how to learn anything fast." >> thanks for having me. >> as you get older you want to think about learning new skills, things you might otherwise have learned earlier in life but didn't have the type. where did the 10,000 hour rule come from in the first place? >> if you look at the research, it came from studies of expert-level perform ears, athletes, musicians, chess grand masters. the question they were trying to answer is what does it take to become the best at something, some ultra competitive field. that research is really interesting. the result was it takes about 10,000 hours over a period of usually about ten years to get there. that research is interesting. it doesn't really answer the question of how do we get better at something? if you want to pick up something as a hobby or want to learn something for your work, it

doesn't take anywhere close to 10,000 hours to decide to learn something and sit down and learn it and get the results you want. >> how hardest to just begin? the very beginning of the learning curve, deciding to adopt a new skill set? >> the beginning of the process is the most difficult. that's the point where we're the most self conscious about what we can and can't do. at the beginning of the process, we're scared, intimidated, may not know where to begin. if you sit down and think through what it is exactly you're trying to do, what do you want to get out of the school and break the skill down into smaller parts, it becomes much easier to practice. your strategy is really simple, look at the sub skills you'll need to know and use most often, practice those first. >> why the ukulele? >> i wanted to learn an instrument i can sing and play at the same time. i had never played an instrument

before. i played trumpet in high school. not a lot of transferable skills between the two. >> 20 hours? >> 20 hours. >> i went from never picking up a stringed instrument to playing in front of a group of about 500 people in a performance. >> this is very inspiring. >> i'll show you how this works. i have two young kids at home. i'm finding myself playing a lot of children's music which is a great place to start, because children's music is fun and easy to remember and also really simple. so it's a good place to learn how to do this. the only thing you need to know to play children's music, three cords, believe it or not, c, f and g. so if you can do that, think. ♪ twinkle, twinkle little star, how i wonder what you are ♪ >> you can learn how to do that in a couple minutes. the skill becomes learning how

to switch between the cords to get the song you want. you do that and then do some fancier stuff with your right hand. ♪ twinkle, twinnal little star >> when you get comfortable with that, there's something called finger picking which is instead of strumming them at the same time, you hit individual stars. ♪ twinkle, twinkle little star, how i wonder what you are ♪ >> it's the same thing. you just need to know how to break it down and practice in a way to make it automatic. it doesn't take long to do that. >> you're a good teacher. >> thank you. appreciate that. >> part of that is people have to be good learners, too. can anybody do this? >> anybody at any age. >> thanks for being here. >> appreciate it. up next, a great story, how an 18-month-old boy literally saved the life of a well-known opera singer.

opera singer. ♪ i want to cross over --

the new york metropolitan opera is one of the world's great stages. when eric jordan sings bass there, his booming voice fits right in. two years ago when he was barely 40, it almost ended. ♪ >> every time i sing, my soul is bared. >> when he had a stroerk a year

and a half ago, opera singer eric jordan's ability to bear his soul, to sing, was stifled. >> 5:30 a.m., the morning of the stroke. 18-month-old gabrielle crawls into bed with his parents. everyone goes back to sleep except eric. >> he never stopped moving around, jerking around, then i realized there's something wrong. >> then the moving around stopped abruptly. >> i slapped him. he wouldn't wake up. >> later at the hospital, doctors removed three large clots in eric's brain saving eric's life and his ability to sing. only eight weeks after his stroke, the bass was back on stage at new york's metropolitan opera. eric says recovering from a stroke has forced him to slow down and to savor life's small blessings and to accept this new version of himself. >> have you changed the way you

look at something helps you change yourself 507s. >> that's going to wrap things up for sgmd. stay connected with me. let's keep the conversation going. "new day sunday" continues right now with christi paul and victor blackwell. -- captions by vitac -- www.vitac.com look who is up and at 'em? we're glad for it. i'm christi paul. >> i'm victor blackwell. we're starting with the destructive wildfires in southern california. the firefighters now seem to have the upper hand. you can thank the weather for that. four major fires are still burning. >> we know in some areas, residents have been given the all clear to return to their homes to assess the damage. at camp pendleton, nearly 20% of the base has burned. our indra petersons has a unique look