thanks for joining us here on r.t. international we're back in 30 minutes. join me every 1st week on the alex salmond show and i'll be speaking to guest of the world of politics sports business i'm showbusiness i'll see you then. time after time corporations repeat the same mantra sustainability very important to accelerate the transition to sustainable transport sustainability stay in her manner a more equitable and sustainable world. they claim their production is completely harmless. it. companies want us to feel good about buying their products while the damage is

being done far away and this is something else this let's keep going to an even and i mean look. this is the mood of news media and i mean when i'm stunned seemed to be best understood so when. i mentioned recount here we're going underground as u.s. voters in new easier to cast their presidential primary ballots in the race for the white house but will arguably do nothing to help the coronavirus recovery in the country with the most confirmed cases and deaths in the world coming up on the show while the mainstream media focused on the lives lost to coronavirus groundbreaking you're a scientist professor adrian owen tells us how covert 970 was may be left with profound long term damage pandas china faces criticism from nato nations for its

national security law and on kong we speak to the youngest of a person to become a legislator in the form of british. colony about fleeing alleged birth to build an international consensus all of them all coming over delays going underground at 1st throughout the current pandemic we've heard that the us has the highest reported number of deaths worldwide while the u.k. has the highest death count or worldwide bar belgium but we haven't heard much about covert patients who have apparently recovered groundbreaking neurosciences the western university in canada present a dream known as studying the after effects of those survivors and believes the findings will show some will develop profound neurological problems he's here to tell me about it for skype from london in on terrio thank you adrian for coming on so normally maybe you'd be in an i.c.u. for the past few months you've been looking into this where now with the research well we've just we just launched a little over a week ago and what we're trying to do is to recruit 50000 covert survivors to this study because you know it's becoming more and more obvious as people are starting

to emerge from the. immediate impact of the virus that that they are developing neurological problems and many of these are our cognitive challenges things like problems in concentrating on as in memory problems and so solving making simple decisions and i think we really need to get on top of this very quickly you really think and you're an expert in this field that this anecdotal evidence of a lot of tasteless of well these may all be connected with brain function. well you know we know that i mean if you think about what goes on in cody's it's essentially a spiritual problem and that of course interferes with the oxygen supply to the brain and we know a lot about how anything that interferes with the oxygen get into your maybe the virus itself sex the brain not that i don't think we will be clear on that yet but we do know that there are these indirect effects caused by a so the oxygen being our ventilator being in the i.c.u.

being on sedatives all of these things and known to affect brain function so what is your. because it's arguably not as exciting for scientists if it is indeed just a function of respiratory. impacts from grown a virus or blood clotting that is affecting the brain as opposed to the virus itself somehow attacking the brain itself we don't i think it is as interesting as you said being in this conversation i spent a lot of my time in the i.c.u. looking at patients who had brain injuries but you know most of those brain injuries aren't due to say an impact to the brain a lot of these patients are people who had a cardiac arrest and the problem you know most people think well that's a heart problem that's not a brain problem but but actually when you have a cardiac arrest it affects the oxygen supply to the brain and the result is brain damage and we have exactly the same problem here you know maybe the interruption of oxygen to the brain is is at a different level but the ultimate result is still brain damage and that's what i'm

really interested in in trying to track and prevent if at all possible and so while there is anecdotal evidence there's also firm evidence the growth of viruses is in the family of sars virus is in and said back in 23 the survivors did have long term neurological complications yes that's right i mean that's just another factor that no meat made us think that it was essential to get on with this study now we experienced this before obviously on a much smaller scale that we know about how survivors of similar viruses in the past have gone on to have long term problems with concentrating and memory in the and these are the not small problems these are things that can affect people's ability to work and people's ability to go about their everyday activities we have more than 10000000 people in the world right now who are recovering from coronavirus and you know imagine if a year from now we have 10000000 people who are able to carry out their their jobs

affectively that's a huge economic and societal problem and of course dementia. alzheimers the biggest killers in this country as of 2018 in the office of national citizen 6 i'm just wondering are you saying the dementia alzheimer's style dynamics may apply in that i don't know our prime minister who recovered from gurren a virus his brain function the fact that it's presumably all fine now it could worsen we're talking about worsening over time it's not just people recover and as long as their brain function recovers it will stay at that function level. i mean that is actually one of the critical questions we were addressing in this study you know it could be and i think we all hope that these problems are temporary people experienced temporary problems with memory and concentration it could be that they're permanent you're just stuck with this situation which is course. much worse

but the worst possible scenario is that this virus can trigger some sort of degenerative situation where people actually get worse over time now we don't know when that's the case not really is it really is too early to say but it could be and we could end up with a generation of people who are suffering with a dementia like illness down the line the prime minister here is under attack for a perceived. care homes where so many thousands of people here died what is there. to link degenerative diseases like dementia with over the tool. where there are many factors involved people who are old are more horrible by definition they tend to have more other medical issues going on they may have spiritual issues and they have heart issues they may have issues with their brain directly you know like dementia so this you know this

population of people are inherently more vulnerable when anything any virus light like this hits and i think that's probably the main factor of course there's a there's a community issue as well of these people are already living together in a you know in a small space so when one of them contracts the virus it's very easy passed on to others and those have been widely discussed in the media but do you think that somehow dementia treatments may help in any if it's proven long term brain effects of growth of ours as if we don't know the answer to that we don't really have effective treatments for dementia and i think the same would be true if it turns out that. virus causes some kind of degenerative situation i think it's unlikely that we're going to have or a treatment that we can pull off the shelf to to. to deal with that but so it's i think the priority right now is to try and understand what these problems are understand how widespread it's going to be and put steps into place to deal with it

if and if and when it occurs as i say we don't have any evidence yet that it is degenerative for those people watching who are recovering from coronavirus but what made you start thinking about brain function was it and you might have to define this word neuro tropic dynamics was it was it this report a lot of taste and lots of swill. yes i mean once it started become apparent that people were losing taste musing smell it it was it was clear there were some neurological issues going on because those are both neurological. neurological symptoms if you like i guess people tend to think it's something to do with the nose because it's it's all in the brain now that that started to make us think well is there anything else going on and i i started to ask around and. talk to people who were recovering from code and many of them were reporting bigger issues problems with things like memory and concentration and early on in the

pandemic i was really thinking well you know this is not a problem for a neuroscientist like me this is a problem for me ologist people who want to understand viruses but you know as this is a new dawn and more and more people are attracted to virus and more and more people in as a result are now starting to recover it's very clear that this is a problem this is not one or 2 people many many people are reporting these kinds of neurological deficits and we've had people on this program from the independent scientific advisory group on emergencies what did you make watching if you did from gallagher of boris johnson here flanked by his top government scientists form of. officials of perjury violence and johnson said we are following the science does that make any sense to you. well i you know i'm going to comment on the the political background to that situation obviously i did watch you know as i was

aware of it and you know i can only hope that the politicians are really taking the scientists very very seriously and i guess i was getting at the fact that science obviously changes and probably changes because of hopefully innovations that you come up with but then if you immediately started to suspect. relations to brain cognition. obviously there's a higher case of frequency of dementia in care homes that there is in the accident emergency or grow the virus warden or spittle do you think there are implications here for future brenda mix i think there are because you know i think everything we can learn from this pandemic will be useful in the future and you know whether that's how best to contain it or best to develop vaccines or how best to anticipate the if you like knock on effects like cognitive deficits and that's why here it's so important for us to get access to a large number of people we want

a lot of people to sign up to cody brain study dot com because then we can start to pull a pull apart some of these pieces you know it may seem obvious that the worse your viral symptoms the worse your cognitive or brain deficits are going to be down the line but you know maybe that's not true maybe even people who are asymptomatic young people people out in the street of got through this without even getting into a hospital maybe those people are also going to be affected with these neurological problems and you know until we assess a lot of people we're really not going to know who's if you like immune you know who's going to run into trouble down the line i know you're at the beginning of the journey if there's a big if there are parallels between how coronavirus itself acts on the brain and dementia what are the what sort of dementia degenerative curve are we looking at i mean will after recovering them basically they're safe well that's an extremely

good question again it's one that we can't really answer until we get get hold of the data and as most people know alzheimer's disease is a is a fairly slow generally a slow moving neurodegenerative disease it can often be some years before you know somebody eventually succumbs to to the disease itself but you know there are other forms of neurodegeneration it go. much more quickly and so. right now we know we don't know whether whether the effects of corona virus are in one of those 2 categories you know i think typically looking at somebody's performance or decline in this case over the course of the year is enough to determine whether they are to generating and how quickly the process is going so that that's actually why we plan to follow people for an entire year because we can learn a lot from how somebody performs a yes or now relative to how they performed day that's really the key is going to tell us with that this is

a moving target or stationary permanent problem which is finally and briefly i know over in china they're coming out with dementia drugs all ego. what if the research money goes into all of this and we get nothing out because if sars did affect brain function back in 2002 and 23 why is it we still don't know more about the the sars family of viruses and how they affect the brain condition. well one of the reasons is because you know we didn't have as many people back then we now have as many people surviving for us to be able to do this kind of research i think you know in many ways sounds a bit dissolved that this is a great scientific opportunity we have one of the largest scientific natural scientific experiments in the world more than 10000000 people contract in the same virus so i think this is the 1st time in history we've really had this sort of opportunity where we can look at the a large proportion of those people look at the experiences they've had look at the

apps the other diseases they were coping with the time whether they were sedated whether they were hospitalized with ice and to magic and try and pack what is behind these things recent this is the 1st time we've been able to do this professor thank you. after the break what are you supposed violent grasses in all kong have to do with the cia we speak to one of them kong's youngest ever that his life is about upholding democracy under the flag of the people's republic of china all of them all going up about through him going underground.

we go to work so you straight home. so what we've got to do is identify the threats that we have it's crazy going from day should've let it be an arms race in this on all fronts very dramatic development. i'm going to resist i don't see how that strategy will be successful betty ok to kill time time to sit down and tom. welcome back well as nato nations remain in the minority in their criticism of china over its new national security law the media has largely been in the majority and voicing concerns that china is trampling over a british democracy that found its roots in colonialism but its shadows have arguably lived on nathan law as the youngest ever legislator to be elected to the

whole go council quoting anti british imperialism up a gun the that eventually led to his arrest spending 7 months in jail he is the founder and former chairman of the pro-democracy party demo system before going on the run to what he alleges is persecution from china and he joins me now via skype from an undisclosed location nathan thanks so much for coming on 1st of all i'm going to ask you why an undisclosed location why we are now the house if you cannot reach for now and. so many answers before i say once again before that i will reveal where my whereabouts and my person. in my person they have for now could it be in response to article 38 of this new law i don't know where you heard in the world but apparently article 38 seems to suggest that any offenses committed against hong kong special administrative region from outside the region by a person who is not a permanent resident of the region is liable for action let alone

a permanent resident which i presume you are a commuter something liable to. be prosecuted it is not about where i've been but. is about well whether there are any are uncertain created by the chinese authority or even that the greatest. reached outside. china yeah i'll just wait and see whether it's safe to reveal my location d.c. power levels with genie in the sun choose to sit here in britain according to the united nations or edward snowden who had to flee to moscow well i think i was there all the while actually on many. many similarities that we could come. from now in hong kong i've been a prominent activist and author of election now with in the car truck tony and know

that while basically none of the laws hong kong has implemented would be like it's just written in such a broad and take anyone who went to protest could possibly be gracious and face life on testosterone consenting so my reaction is to touch a little and yeah it's definitely destroying of course freedom and it's all ptolemy were things best because i'm going to say we have to prove apparently that deng xiaoping's translates her own who said he want to that julie this wants to be free in this country with things better in hong kong do you think under the british dictatorship when the path and there was a sachin. well 1st of all. it is quite meaningless to come the same types in different era because the time has changed and secondly we could see as the last 2 decades actually hong kong and alaska that case of its colonial time all call

actually. was implemented with a serious offer liberalisation and democratisation measures but it all being returned to the 5 base chain so we could see a paycheck and actually intense on a whole the process of democratization in hong kong and to concentrate power more and more throughout the implementation of one country 2 systems you see the chinese and. dorothy's claim that this is imperialist meddling they accuse hong kong human rights groups of being some of the sometimes in the payment is often linked to cia backed organizations that are in u.s. government funded n.g.o.s while these are all at from beijing has always been used to stay much higher stockholm movement they have never provided any relevant after those for the accusation because these are not true welcome people come out to protest for their own sake and for the sake of democracy and because china well

have not been doing what their promises on compete for which are democracy and autonomy so while it kind of narrative is being used to fuel its own purpose and and tries to fool the world by their well refused to listen to these guys so it is in court of law to recognize that this is a movement mobilized by holcombe people themselves in self so-called 'd but florrie power for as this is not about in perilous is about high an author a terrier expansion they wanted to control on call every erotic aid or the freedoms that we have enjoyed is a means to an end for the so called human rights activists to work with cia linked organizations because the national endowment for democracy is clear that it has a role in the pro-democracy movement professors you zhang room has been imprisoned a constitutional law professor who we asked about on this program he wrote for the

national endowment for democracy it's on his on their website and the any day of his be funded by the. well i have no idea what that kind of accusation was the ground was merely someone writing something on their website or the organization you know if you resort to the ground and supporting the gun by their own even though there are international organization night boys a couple to hong kong but that doesn't mean that wrestling financially organized or organized what you have coined now about the length of an easy phone call in this matter is a correct description i'm not sure of the hundreds of millions of people whose governments are being destabilized by the naslund of a democracy how given the over the decades would agree tell me about the hong kong democracy council that your on the board of hong kong people elect. organization focus on. africa if you walk on our own in the us

it does not directly involved in the local ground in hong kong right but it's called the hong kong democracy council and it seems to have direct links to lobbying in washington for laws. that suggest unless hong kong enact legislation that helps washington there should be u.s. sanctions on china well i say. rationale behind the law is when china is found out to ration a well it's a toad it accountable because the declaration is time and by british and chinese government and it is tabled in the united nations so i was talking about the professional treatment of hong kong that is a major premise of that which is hong kong remains autonomous so if home going

under the direct autocratic control from china it is just an ordinary chinese city so why the well should all the perpetual shame and phone call i think this is the logic behind the i don't i don't think the way to country use the use of words and the rationale behind. hong kong human rights and democracy that help the discussion exam is not the will do that it's a tiny minority of countries nato countries that we're talking about most of the world isn't making a big fuss about this hong kong act and perhaps they see that it is absurd the china should abide by u.s. legislation over what is part of its country i think that is also and all the false protection was the act because the act is about whether the u.s. should continue to give preferential treatment to hong kong which from the

perspective of china that could possibly be the internal policy of the u.s. in meddling on an issue and we have to understand that that international status of hong kong is being recognized by the intent of coming in to be a step they have to show that they remain strong rule through all and all told me so that the trust is on system just hunky i don't adjust to about i don't want to just talk about the u.s. hong kong human rights and democracy act which marco rubio lobbied for with. george for your colleague and samuel too but it clearly says sanctions should be in put on china if china does not serve us interests what sort of act is that i presume you lobbied for this act well i think. that's on the lay for hong kong people's point of view we need to hold china accountable and that's what the welfare to do so for the high value of normal people on the street and on kong is they should be

a defacto colony of the united states well i don't think that is a direct link so call me and call on the states and that kind of call don't call only you know my set was the current international says it's absolutely wrong you don't call it not on the us then that kind of relevant sanctioning mckenna's them like the money. all the human rights falling out so i don't think that kind of like . the. current state of mind and i think you're using the wrong comparison to understand what's happening in hong kong the because it's he acts rusher alleging that that is related to nato nations intelligence services to me why you think we haven't heard more about the we go muslim concentration camps that we did hear of a while back apparently millions of muslims imprisoned and the news seems to have

disappeared from from. newspapers and mainstream media because hong kong with a lot of international media station and i urge the world that we should continue to pressure beijing to china and to and the contribution coming change which actually the u.s. congress has passed and not. well concerning that issue so i think that it's not about him paralysed them it's all about conan this is about the well they have like acumen a thing well let's just image the. throughout the past decade because well liberal community it allowed them to do so and that's not right you see evidence of these so-called concentration camps apparently comes from the network of chinese human rights defenders backed financed by the us government and homophobic far right i call adrian sense there are only 2 pieces of evidence in fact the basis for

the accusation that millions of we get is. in concentration camps based on 8 people interviewed by the network of chinese human rights defenders is that propaganda to have you seen the serious of b.b.c. covering back news. yes absolutely. does it also count people that you counted in. well again as i say the evidence for the initial accusations or 8 people you're saying there is no involvement you've had no involvement with anyone involved in u.s. intelligence as regards your role or your colleagues role in the hong kong protest movement. by my colleagues and i have no connection to the us intelligence and any thought of intelligence from around the world we fight for hong kong people's freedom for our own and. calm people are they the law of your safe thank you. and that's over the shoulder back on monday 4 years after you

get prime minister david cameron resigned after failing to keep britain in the e.u. and overseeing a policy of you have led to deaths of the citizens he vowed to protect children wash your hands join the underground you've got facebook and instagram. stumbles world famous hockey a stiffy a museum which was originally founded. as a day to. developing in an otherwise middle income and of other countries and the money is flowing to the big companies and it's really not getting down to the people that need it. the poll finds mixed feelings in the e.u. on welcoming u.k.

tourists without self isolation as brits get the green light to travel to 59 countries i think they will be regarded so what with suspicion.