as jocke and horses prepare for the 148th precursor, a look at the state of horseracing and why so many horses die at america's racetracks. what you need to know about the growth of artificial telligence in medicine. and how three native communities in louisiana are fighting to save their tribal lands from rising sea levels. >> we have outsiders come here and they see the loss. we who belong here, we see what is still here, what is still viable, what still makesife in this region so precious. ♪

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station from viewers like you. thank you. >> good evening, i'm john yang. president biden is headed into the last day of the g7 summit while keeping an eye on the potential for economic disaster if he cannot make a deal with congress on raising e debt limit. white house and house republican negotiators met for more than an hour with no apparent signs of progress. the president is due back at the white house late sunday from his abbreviated trip. in japan, nestor biden said he's not worried about friday's pause and restarted the talks. >> what happens is the carriers go back to the principles and say this is what we are thinking about. and people put down new claims. i believe we can avoid a default and we will get something decent done. >> the u.s. treasury can run out of cash and need to borrow to meet its debts as early as june

1. the day 47 billion dollars in medicare benefits be paid. ukrainian president zelenskyy is also at the g7 summit gathering support from world leaders ahead of the anticipated counteroffensive to take back russian controlled territory. he met with the indian prime minister today for the first time. modi so far refused to condemn russia's invasion of ukraine. he scheduled to meet with president biden tomorrow. in los angeles, brittney griner played in her first regular-season game since she was freed from a russian prison. vice president harris attended the game and spoke to brittney griner and her teammates before the opening tipoff. >> all that you did in supporting brittany. i know that was rough and difficult for you. >> the team was greeted with a standing ovation when they took

the court. she was top scorer in their loss to the fourth angela's -- in the los angeles sparks. still to come. medicines use of artificial intelligence and native communities fight rising sea levels. >> this is pbs news weekend from w eta studios in washington, home of the pbs newshour, weeknights on pbs. >> people will be watching this evening's preakness to see a derby winner when the second in the triple crown. and to see if all seven horses make it around the one mile oval safely. during one of the preliminary races, a horse was fatally injured and euthanized. deaths are alarmingly common. over 10 days leading up to the kentucky derby, seven horses died at churchill downs.

according to a group that opposes raising as inhumane -- racing is inhumane, 136 thoroughbreds have died, last year, 901. more than two every day. beth harris covers the horseracing industry for the associated press. you heard the numbers, they come from a group that opposes -- wants to see horseracing go away. what would you say to put them into perspective? >> you have to look at other numbers. these would be from the equine injury database the jockey club maintains. they take the numbers and granular lies them from racetracks around the country. those show per 1000 starters in 2022, the rate of fatalities declined, it was the fourth straight year that the rate has declined. everybody has different sets of numbers. that is generally considered the industry standard.

the equine injury database. >> you say there is an acceptable level, or the industry is? >> i think the industry would say acceptable level is zero. they also understand you will never get to zero. it is something that over time -- you can get us close to zero, but these fatalities have reasons behind them. it is highly unpredictable in terms of sending horses and jockeys to race every day and what can happen. >> another thing critics talk about his medication and doping of horses. it is to keep horses competing. who may be fragile in health and threatening their health i doing this. what is the response of the industry? >> the industry has gotten something called the horseracing integrity and safety authority.

it is going to kick in two days after the preakness in terms of anti-doping and medication controls. they hope it will be the so-called central office for racing in the u.s., much like the commissioner's office in baseball, football, hockey, basketball. it will be a centralized authority overseeing the prerace, post race testing, they plan on extensive out of competition testing, as well. there will be a set level of standards that we will adhere to. test,, they plan to notify it in a quicker fashion than what in -- when it is left up to the individual racing states, which is how it has been. i know that was congressionally mandated after a high number of

deaths at santa anita in 2018 and 2019. has there been any opposition in the industry or state racing commission's? very much so. i and full of states as well as an organation representing about 30,000 trainers and owners in the u.s. who fired multiple lawsuits against heisel, claiming it is violating constitutionality. these groups would rather have the states and state elected racing officials mandate what is going on instead of turning it over to the higher power congress has approved. >> you mentioned there have been clusters of deaths and multiple reasons for horseracing deaths. when you get clusters like the one we saw at santa anita in 2018, i think 30 horses died, a cluster of seven in a month at laurel park. the string of seven at churchill

downs. is there a commonality through those clusters? >> some of the injuries occurred during training, some in actual races. with the deaths at churchill downs, it was a variety of situations. two in races on derby day. another one when a horse flipped . it may have been spooked by something it saw and it flipped and hurt itself and was not able to be saved. generally there are a variety of causes. it can be a catastrophic leg injury. some horses have dropped dead of heart attacks. each case can be individual. there is obviously standards by which they investigate these deaths. they do necropsy's to analyze the animal. much like we would have an autopsy and a human being.

there's a variety of reasons. that is most before the link to the industry and fans and critics. there is no answer, no easy answer for why this is happening. >> beth hera's of the associated press, thank you. -- beth harris of the associated press, thank you. >> artificial intelligence is finding its place in all sorts of scientific fields. perhaps none holds most lifesaving promise than health care. programs are learning to answer medical questions and diagnose illnesses. but there are still problems to be worked out. i spoke with dr. isaac rouhani, editor in chief of the new england journal of medicine ai and chair of harvard's department of medical informatics. i asked him about ai's potential in medicine. >> doctors can definitely use ai as an implementation.

they will be reminded of all of the things that they should know about their patient, and similar patients like them. at the same time, patients are all too aware that in the u.s., we don't have enough primary care doctors. we have very little time with doctors who can get any time. providing another if flawed resource to get them medical advice so they can decide whether or not to seek mical advice is also probably going to be transformative. when a doctor sees m they have forgotten a lot of details about me. what if you could have, and it is doable today, a summary that says what are all of the important things i have medically that you should know about today? and then saying what are all of

the other patients who are like me, what are the right treatments? is he on the right treatments? are there any screening testings we should do on him today during his visit? medicine is getting increasingly more complex. there are more things we know how to do for preventive medicine. prevention is getting less and less attention in many ways. doctors are so busy. these ai programs are not infallible. they can make mistakes. but at least it is a conversation you can have, and decide if you should discuss it with your doctor. >> how far off are these things? >> right now, they are highly imperfect. but they are being used today. the reason they are being used is because there is such great need. we've all heard of the so-called dr. google.

people use search already to obtain medical advice with -- when chatgpt was released by openai this past winter, patients started using it hurried we know it for a fact. doctors started using it. 30% of theosfts cea olt harhtheg authorization, deciding whether to do reimbursements, and they involve some judgment, medical judgment about how appropriate the care is, whether patients should be allowed or not. >> you set a number of times it is flawed, imperfect, what should the patient be looking for? are there red flags? >> sometimes it can be quite subtle. the obvious are it makes a reference to an authoritative source. check the source. these programs have been known to make up citations.

google and microsoft are working hard to eliminate those by having independent programs second. i would never do anything that was at all risky without first checking with a medical authority. change your medication, which it will not. it says the medication may not be appropriate. that is useful to allow you to have a conversation. i would not do it. the other thing is using human common sense turns out to be an incredibly useful filter. >> farther down the road, what is the promise of ai? what do developers and others hope it will be able to do in the future? >> i think doctors are not spending enough time withents. they are spending too much time as bureaucrats. having ai take care of that bureaucracy will help doctors interface more with patients. the longer-term hope, i don't mean 20 years, i'm talking about

five years. these programs will be able to look at all of the data under the right privacy provisions. and actually come up with new biomedical insights. new potential treatments. groups of patients who could benefit from these treatments and actually accelerate the drug discovery process, as well. because in the end, the same limitations we are talking about human beings as doctors also afflict human beings as life science researchers. they can't know everything. they can't know all of the discoveries made at one time. these programs are pretty good about knowing about every thing. >> is that the biggest potential pitfall, too much reliance? >> that is absolutely the pitfall. i would rely on our common sense. i'm not convinced, nor are others it has common sense at all times.

even if it did, in the end, we have to be true to our values. i'm pretty sure at this point, we cannot rely on these programs on sharing our values. the most important thing they can do, tell us which data these models are trained on. that tells me, for example, that i don't know if it correctly represents the problems american patients have, or if it saw data from india. not knowing which data we are used to treating these leaves a lot of uncertainty about the quality and applicability to the populations. >> dr. isaac ohana, thank you very much. >> a pleasure talking to you.

>> in louisiana, coastal erosion claims an average of a football field of land every hour. some native american communities and southeastern louisiana are the hardest hit. special correspondent megan thompson brings us the story of three indigenous communities fighting to save their land. >> she's buried all the way in the back right-hand corner, my grandpa's mom. >> at a small cemetery, devon pays her respects to his native american ancestors. he spent his early years here in louisiana as part of the grand band of biloxi. the tribe of nearly 1100 people has been in the area for centuries. but now he's worried about its future. >> one of the biggest problems, when we have storms, the storm surge it brings will sometimes carry these coffins out and people will have to go out into the water and grab these coffins

and bring them back. >> the coffin that was once in this grave has disappeared. some of the tombstones are deteriorating or turned upside down. but the destruction of this final resting pace is one part of a much bigger problem. >> this right here is where i lived up until the second grade. >>'s childhood home was destroyed in 2005 by hurricane rita. >> i think about all that has been lost, culture, heritage, physical lands. i think about the efforts going on now about coastal restoration and how they do not do enough for the communities on the front lines. >> he's now in a position to help change that. >> how are you doing? >> last year, h became the chief of his tribe. he also earned a bachelors degree in geoscience so he can study how much coastal land loss was affecting tribal communities. >> my research specifically with

answering questions other scientists did not come down here to answer. >> he found some travel communities are losing land at more than double the rate of the rest of coastal louisiana. because tribes were pushed out to the farthest reaches of louisiana's southeastern coast after the u.s. government forced them to relocate in the 1800s. >> even in my lifetime, the shoreline has encroached and moved further inland. >> he alsoas a new job working for the environmental defense fund. he's partnering with other tribal leaders in louisiana state university to tackle one major cause of erosion. the 27,000 abandoned canals dug over decades by the oil and gas industry that have sliced up the wetlands. rex the by user getting wider. >> they are members of the pointe osha tribe 16 miles east of their tribal home. they are working to convince

outsiders tribal land is worth saving. >> whenever we have meetings, i tell them we are the bumper, but if you don't protect us -- >> all of this used to be forest where he would hunt as a boy. now surrounded by water as far as the eyes can see. trees killed by saltwater. they blame the old canals like this one for allowing the ocean water in. all of the water makes the shoreline erode faster. >> it pretty much washes away the bottom and works up until it falls into the water. >> oil and gas companies were supposed to fill them back in with soil. but the state stopped enforcing the requirement long ago. they secured over 500 $50,000 in grants to start doing it themselves. they hope this canal will be the first. research from louisiana state univerty shows filling them back in repairs the land and is

relatively inexpensive. cracks three or four. >> he's leading another restoration to protect the shoreline. he and a team from the coalition to restore coastal louisiana stacked oyster shells collected from local restaurants along the banks. over time, the barrier builds up as new oysters row on top of the old shells. >> the goal is for this to keep expanding and hopefully they bust through the bags and keep growing. >> since 2019, ty have built reefs from about 400 tons of oyster shells. during that time, the bank that is not protected has eroded by several feet. >> since we did not go further with the bags, it eroded. >> for them to have hope of saving their land, the project need to be done at a much larger scale. louisiana is already spending

billions on its coastal master plan, and almost two decade long battle to battle the rising seas. but they feel left out. >> we have to go on our own looking for funds to try and save our community because they are not. >> they are fighting with another tribal leader to get more funding for resiliency projects and storm repairs. for years, she was president of the first peoples conservation council that advocates for tribes along louisiana's coast. she's also a tribal elder in grand bayou village. 40 miles east of the dart are spirit a tiny indigenous community accessible by boat. >> we have been inhabitants of louisia for many centuries. our whole lives tied around being on theoast in connection to the water. >> damage from hurricane ida is obvious everywhere. hed w away anasd it>>

ineeds t to be replaced. >> homes are destroyed and boats are racked. >> i'm borrowing this because mine is still damaged. >> he earns a living from fishing. he also gives away hundreds, sometimes thousands of pounds of seafood to feed his commuty. hurricane ida caused $25,000 worth of damage to his boat. >> i've been having boats all my life. this is my last one. seeing it the way it is, it is heartbreaking. >> the federal emergency management agency could help out. t haed outor an $binlastr yea to victims of disasters. but the national congress of american indians says federal money for security and emergencies is not delivered evenly. tribal citizens receive only three dollars for every $26 nontribal citizens receive from the department of homeland security, which houses fema.

>> the government is paper heavy. paper is not an indigenous concept, it is not how we record time or events. >> they don't often have documents like land deeds. many don't have basic computer skills but the applications are all online. so she's helped create a program to train travel members to navigate these complex government systems. >> we are trying to find a way to make the connection between who we are and what they expect. >> a small victory recently. after lobbying, the biden administration extended the deadline for hurricane ida relief to june 1. she says the hard work is worth it. despite the challenges, her people will never leave. >> we have outsiders come here and they see the lack and the loss. we who belong her we see what is still here, what is still viable, what makes life in this

region so precious. we don't just survive here, we thrive. >> f pbs news weekend, megan thompson. >> now online, more reporting on the environment, including an instagram story on what it will take to reduce global plastic llution. all that and more on our webpage -- news or instagram page. that is pbs news weekend for this saturday. for all of my colleagues, thanks for joining us. see you tomorrow. >> major funding for pbs news week at been provided by. >> for 25 years, consumer cellular has offered a wireless contract plans to help people do more of what they like. our customer service team can help find a plan that fits you. to learn more, visit

consumercellular.tv. >> and with the ongoing support of these individuals and institutions. this program was made possible by the corporation for public broadcasting. and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you.

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