Join us for a look at the picturesque town and its history. See how the mining industry helped put Jerome on the map and how its disappearance nearly destroyed it. Today, it’s a popular tourist destination.
>> Cary Pfeffer:
Tonight on "Horizon," Maricopa County will have a new behavioral health provider for public mental health services. The State Health Services deputy director talks about the transition. And public health officials continue to warn the public about a ground beef recall because of concerns that repackaged meat by grocery stores may contain E. coli. Plus, the mining industry helped put Jerome on the map, and the lack of it nearly destroyed the town. Today, it's a popular tourist destination - picturesque Jerome and its history. Those stories, next, on "Horizon."
>> Cary Pfeffer:
Good evening, I'm Cary Pfeffer, Welcome to "Horizon." The state budget is on the way to the governor. This afternoon the Arizona House approved the budget by a 38-21 vote. All the nays came from Republicans. A spokesperson for the governor says it is a budget agreement the governor can sign. The senate approved the $10.8 billion budget last night. With the budget passage now behind them, lawmakers are expected to adjourn the session later this week. People who receive their mental health care services through the regional behavioral health system will have a new behavioral health provider. Magellan Health Services will begin providing public mental health services on September 1. Eddy Broadway, Arizona Department of Health Services Deputy Director, joins us to answer a few frequently asked questions about the transition. Thank you for being here.
>> Eddy Broadway:
Thank you. I appreciate being here.
>> Cary Pfeffer:
First of all, let's talk about this transition process. The Arizona Department of Health Services goes out and finds a manager that provides this service, and now it's going to move to a different company, correct?
>> Eddy Broadway:
That is correct. We contract with what we call our Behavioral Health Authority. This is really a managed care organization. They in turn contract with service providers to provide the services to the clients and the members in our system. We started this process about a year and a half ago with a great number of stakeholder groups, town halls, and forums, etcetera, and made a lot of changes in our contract that will take place, starting on September 1.
>> Cary Pfeffer:
And to sort of describe the sequence of events, there's the Department of Health Services, the state government arm, and then there's this provider, Magellan, will take over on September 1 and then there are the companies that Magellan works with to actually provide the care for folks looking for mental health services in Maricopa County. Is that accurate?
>> Eddy Broadway:
Right, that is correct. And many of these service providers will be the same as they were with a Value Options contract, because there's a finite amount of service providers in Maricopa County. One of the significant shifts that will occur over time, not necessarily on September 1, will be a move away from the managed care organization providing direct services to network providers providing those services, the whole array of services.
>> Cary Pfeffer:
And that gives more options to someone searching for these services?
>> Eddy Broadway:
It does. To begin with, it starts with a choice that the member can flex between either network. And this is one of the most strongly communicated messages that we received, that they did not want the Behavioral Health Authority providing those services.
>> Cary Pfeffer:
Just to take a step back. People watching this program might say: Why do we need a separate company in between here? In other words, we're talking about more than a billion dollars over a couple of years of period of time. Why doesn't the state provide these services or why do we have to have these extra layers in between.
>> Eddy Broadway:
The way Arizona has chosen to deliver services is that the behavioral system of Arizona is such that we are the exclusive provider of behavioral. The way our law is set up is that we sub-contract with a managed care authority who is an expert at delivering behavioral healthcare and who can provide a whole array of covered services through a network of providers.
>> Cary Pfeffer:
In other words you searched out around the country for experts who do this kind of work in different places.
>> Eddy Broadway:
Absolutely. And this model has been in place in Arizona for a number of years.
>> Cary Pfeffer:
At the same time, obviously mental health issues in this country have been hot potato circumstances because of quality of healthcare, the way it's been handled in the past. What assurances can you give to those family members and to those patients that this is going to represent an improvement?
>> Eddy Broadway:
Well, to begin with, before we get too far in that direction, I want to assure folks watching right now that the department is going to continue services through the transition period and through the improvement with Magellan. That's one of the key factors over the next few months. With the new contract beginning September 1, we have put in many performance guarantees that target certain types of issues that are important to patient care. There is also money surrounding that, that if they don't hit those performance targets, which are really good quality care, then they don't receive that payment.
>> Cary Pfeffer:
So you have more ways to sort of monitor that process and hold the carrot to the stick.
>> Eddy Broadway:
Monitoring and paying for performance.
>> Cary Pfeffer:
So for those watching who have a family member that receives care or has a family member with a health issue, it is important to know that it's not a massive change that's going to take place from September 1, even though the management company changes.
>> Eddy Broadway:
That is correct. As it is today, Value Options operates about 24 clinics across the Valley. Those clinics or service sites will continue and patients will continue to receive the same types of services, mostly from the same providers. So there should not be that big of a change. And we've made ourselves available through our customer service lines to make sure that if people have questions or concerns, they can phone us and we can be of assistance.
>> Cary Pfeffer:
And it's also important to know that, based on the reading I had done for this, Magellan is not completely new to Arizona. This is a company that's been here before.
>> Eddy Broadway:
That's correct. They have had a presence here with radiology management from my understanding for quite some time. They've had an office here.
>> Cary Pfeffer:
This is an agreement that goes through three years?
>> Eddy Broadway:
Yes.
>> Cary Pfeffer:
And there is an option for a couple more?
>> Eddy Broadway:
There is an option for two one-year renewals for a total of a five-year contract but the initial contract is three years.
>> Cary Pfeffer:
And if anyone wants more information where should they go?
>> Eddy Broadway:
We started out this past Friday with a forum for the public to present their ideas and if they had questions and then the department along with Magellan answered questions for an hour. There is a slideshow available on Magellan's Web site about what's going on with the implementation. Also they can call the Department of Health and check out our Web site www.azdhs.gov for information.
>> Cary Pfeffer:
Thanks very much Eddy. We appreciate it. Good luck.
>> Eddy Broadway:
Thanks.
>> Cary Pfeffer:
The Arizona Department of Health is continuing to caution consumers about a ground beef recall. Public health officials are warning the public about the expansion of a USDA ground beef recall because of concerns that repackaged meat by grocery stores may contain E. Coli. In a moment we'll talk more about the recall. But first, Merry Lucero has a look at how samples of the ground beef is tested at the state health lab.
>> Merry Lucero:
The process at the Arizona state health lab to accurately test the ground beef for the E. Coli bacteria is complex. Public Health Scientist Roumen Penev starts with a basic preparation of a sample.
>> Roumen Penev:
We don't know if there's something in this meat or no. We'll first try to make the bacteria grow and then we'll try to isolate it. I will take 25 grams as a sample from the middle.
>> Merry Lucero:
He will reduce the growth of other bacteria to grow the E coli bacteria if it is present. This biochemical analysis will identify the outbreak organism. The process can take several days.
>> Roumen Penev:
Only some species of bacteria can grow. Not all of them.
>>Bill Slanta:
It is an extensive process because the food products themselves are not sterile. We have to separate the pathogenic organisms from the non-pathogenic organisms and sometimes it's very difficult to do that. That's why we have the original enrichment process and then the plating process where we're putting it onto different types of media and we're taking multiple picks from these different media to try to separate and clean up and get a pure isolate of what is quite possibly a pathogenic organism.
>>Merry Lucero:
Last month the state health lab received a sample of ground beef bought at a local store in Yavapai County. The consumers had become ill. That sample did turn out to contain the pathogen E. coli.
>>Bill Slanta:
We received frozen ground beef patties. Sample, when it arrived. We processed the sample according to standard bacterial analytical methods as proscribed by the Food and Drug Administration. And we confirmed that the isolate from the food sample was the same E. coli that was identified in the patient's clinical sample. Afterwards, we transmitted the D.N.A. fingerprint pattern to the Centers for Disease Control, which posted that on their "Pulsenet" site, and they determined that this was the outbreak strain of E. coli.
>> Merry Lucero:
"Pulsenet" is a national network of public health and food regulatory agency laboratories coordinated by the C.D.C. It was instrumental in the ground beef recall by a Los Angeles-based food processor, which was expanded to 5.7 million pounds of ground beef products. The sell dates of the recall are from April 6 to May 7. The ground beef included several brand name products and was repackaged under several store brand names. Consumers should only eat ground beef patties that have been cooked to a safe temperature of 160 degrees.
>> Cary Pfeffer:
Joining me now with more on the ground beef recall is Will Humble, deputy assistant director for public health at The Arizona Department of Health Services. Thanks for being here.
>> Will Humble:
Thanks.
>> Cary Pfeffer:
We heard probably the most important information right at the end. People need to make sure and cook their ground beef thoroughly and completely.
>> Will Humble:
Right. There's a level of expectation that the ground beef is clean and medium rare is okay. It's not okay. Cook it until it's 160 degrees in the center. If you're making thick patties, you really need to use a thermometer to make sure. You can't really go by the color. The thinner hamburgers, the thinner patties, it's easier to get it to 160 degrees in the center.
>> Cary Pfeffer:
Let's take a step back. We'll probably hit on that again before we let you go. But to make sure that people understand this, this was beef originally packaged and ground at a plant in California.
>> Will Humble:
That's right.
>> Cary Pfeffer:
But the fact is that once it leaves there, it can go in a hundred different directions.
>> Will Humble:
Right. Just because it leaves with one label doesn't mean anything, because just about anything happens out there in the consumer marketplace. So, looking for United Foods on the label isn't going to help you a lot, because it could say just about anything by now.
>> Cary Pfeffer:
So what happens in that world, within sort of the meat processing business, is that it leaves that plant, ends up getting packaged and repackaged, or maybe frozen or to a restaurant, or it could go to a grocery store. The process then, it seems, becomes a bit of a Sherlock Holmes mystery for folks at the Department of Health Services. You get calls from doctors saying I've got a patient that's showing signs of E. coli.
>> Will Humble: This really highlights the whole public health system. The laboratory is the place where we figure out what exactly got people sick, and you saw them testing the hamburger. They're testing that against fecal samples of patients who got sick. They can actually use that D.N.A typing to find that smoking gun and say, look, that hamburger made that person sick and link the two using D.N.A technology.
>> Cary Pfeffer:
With absolute certainty.
>> Will Humble:
Yep.
>> Cary Pfeffer:
And that's not very easy in the world.
>> Will Humble:
We get that information from the doctors. So folks go to their docs and say, gee, these are my symptoms. They take the fecal sample. When that turns up positive, they tell us at the state or county health department. That gives us the information that we need so we can do the follow-up investigation and get the food off the shelf. What you're seeing here is an example of something that happened because of Investigation work that happened right here in Arizona. We got the information from docs, we did the laboratory testing, linked the two, and we really were the trigger to get the USDA to put together this recall.
>> Cary Pfeffer:
It was a matter of numbers? In other words, you were seeing so many cases that you thought you sort of had to ring the alarm bell?
>> Will Humble:
We had six cases here in Arizona, 16 nationwide. We have a great laboratory, you just saw it on the piece, and we were able to sort of put that together. We do that sort of hub work here in Arizona, and then the CDC does the nationwide hub work. By using the partnerships that we have with CDC, we're able to really get these recalls done very quickly. If you think back 10 years ago, even, it took a lot longer to figure out what was going on, because we just didn't have that D.N.A technology.
>> Cary Pfeffer:
And in overall food safety, what can you tell people when they hear about a recall, hear about E. coli, they become concerned and start looking suspiciously at their food. What do you tell somebody who is worried?
>> Will Humble:
Well, they're on the right track. Right now, this is summer, this is our foodborne illness season. Now it's very important this time of year to really think about food safety. If you leave your food out, if it's in the car, or if you're having a picnic outdoors, it's so hot, those organisms love those kinds of temperatures. It really makes sense to pay attention to food safety at home. Believe it or not, people who get sick from foodborne illnesses are usually sick from something that happened in their house, not in a restaurant. People's knee-jerk reaction is it happened when I ate out. No, it probably happened when you ate in.
>> Cary Pfeffer:
Make sure to wash hands and have a clean atmosphere to do your work, and make sure you cook your food thoroughly.
>> Will Humble:
Make sure you wash your cutting boards thoroughly wash your hands. Don't leave foods sitting out on the counter too long, and cook it to the right temperatures.
>> Cary Pfeffer:
Do we know if most of that meat is out of the system?
>> Will Humble:
We can't really know. They pulled out and did the recall the best they could. It's the third biggest recall of meat ever in the U.S. They pull what they can, but they're never going to get 100 percent. Just basically assume that ground beef is contaminated and cook it to the right temperatures, and you'll be fine.
>> Cary Pfeffer:
Thanks, Will, I appreciate it.
>> Will Humble:
Thanks.
>> Cary Pfeffer:
Arizona would not be what it is without the mining industry. From gold to silver and on to copper, miners scraped and burrowed into the earth, seeking riches. Nestled on the edge of the Verde Valley, the town of Jerome witnessed the history of mining from its mansions, its street, and its vertical perspective. In tonight's Arizona Story, producer Larry Lemmons and our videographers Rick Torruellas and Scot Olson, tell of the town's remarkable survival.
>>Ronne Roope:
We now have, of course, an incredible tourist community, artists' community. So I think the legacy is preserving the entire community And trying to keep it as much - can't say the way it was - but at least preserving that history.
>> Nora Graf:
This is really the story of Arizona, right here. People came here to get jobs and they came here for a life.
>> Narrator:
Life in Jerome, Arizona. It could be hard and dangerous. Life was about working the mines, or meeting the needs of miners when they emerged from the earth after a long shift. Jerome grew out of the ground, the ground that prospectors dug for gold, and later for silver. But copper would become the element of preference.
>> James McBride:
And as they worked from the gold to the silver, they were getting into copper. And with a demand for copper now as a result of increased use of electricity, copper prices are high enough and the ore in many cases rich enough that you can continue the same kind of lode mining with copper that you had done for gold and silver.
>> Narrator:
The United Verde Copper Company, named for the Verde Valley that yawns to the east, was founded in 1883. A mining camp and shacks that grew around the mine were named after the company's primary investor, Eugene Jerome.
>> Nora Graf:
But he actually never even came to Jerome. He invested his money and said, you have to name the town after me, but that was it.
>> Narrator:
Set apart from the town itself, the Douglas mansion seems symbolic of the power of Arizona mining. James Stewart Douglas, whose father was the first President of the Phelps Dodge Corporation, a rich copper vein was found and the mansion became emblematic of Jerome's boomtown years - of great taste and comfort to the family. But the miners' lives were not nearly so comfortable.
>> Nora Graf:
Generally they might have worked 10 -12 hour shifts. Depending on what part of the operation you worked at, you went in to work and were basically underground all day, doing really hard labor. You're shifting a lot of rock and drilling with equipment that's heavy and difficult to maneuver. You didn't have any safety equipment and so it was very, very dangerous.
>> Bruce Dingus:
The work was so intense that when miners came up from the mines, all they wanted was a good meal and a place to lay their head, because they'd be back at it once their shift started up. So it was a grueling kind of work and people didn't last at it terribly long.
>> Narrator:
What little pay the miners earned was coveted by the various enterprises that offered them relief from their labor.
>> Ronne Roope:
Well, of course, we had the saloons, probably about 27 that we know of that were advertising in the paper and what have you. We had two levels of prostitution here actually. Around the corner from where we are now was the crib area, where the women had their own rooms and worked independently, so to speak. Then we had the wealthier area, over in this direction, and that was where you had the buildings like the Black Cat and the Cuban Queen and those higher class brothels had madams and things.
>> Narrator: Traveling the streets of Jerome today, the past mingles with the present. In its boom years, Jerome could have been described as an international city, attracting people of many nationalities. But the majority of people in those days were from Mexico.
>> Nora Graf:
The largest population was Mexicans, and they flocked to the area. They actually lived in a segregated section of town. And they were paid less, even though they did most of the hard labor.
>> Ronne Roope:
Probably 75 percent of the people who had homes here at the time ran boarding houses, actually fed the miners, they rented out the rooms in the three shifts that the miners worked. Particularly the Hispanic population was very much involved in running boarding houses.
>> Narrator:
Steps are common in this vertical town, as well as evidence of gravity. At times, parts of Jerome began sliding down the mountain.
>> Nora Graf:
It was a pretty big town. We had 15,000 people who lived here, but they were also blasting all the time. There's also a couple of geologic faults underneath the ground here. So the mines were blasting through considerably and the ground started to shift. And the buildings on the side of the hill began to slide down. Of course, the most famous one is the Sliding Jail, which slid something like 200 feet.
>> Narrator:
Eventually the ore played out. And Jerome was nearly abandoned. But it was reborn as a tourist destination. It has survived fires, floods, The Great Depression, and the decline of mining. It lives today as a reminder of the tough people and hard living that gave birth to the town. Its long gone spirit seems to live still in the abandoned mines.
>> Narrator:
We will be featuring "Arizona Stories" segments each Tuesday Night here on "Horizon." And now you can see the new series of the half-hour program, "Arizona Stories," tonight, and every Tuesday night at 7:30.
>> State lawmakers have until the end of the current legislative session to come up with a plan to adequately fund public education for English Language Learners. The latest on that, and new rules that require Arizona utilities to generate more energy from renewable sources like the Sun. That's Wednesday at 7:00 from "Horizon."
>> And of course, don't forget on Friday it'll be the "Journalists' Roundtable," as always, here on "Horizon." I want to thank my guests, Eddy Broadway, as well as Will Humble, and to remind you once again to cook that ground beef thoroughly. I'm Cary Pfeffer. Have a great evening. Good night.
Eddy Broadway:Deputy Director, Arizona Department of Health Services ;Will Humble:Deputy Assistant Director, Public Health, Arizona Department of Health Services;
