♪ Sorry, we're closed.

Kentucky reaction as a budget battle shuts down the federal government.

>> We've been told in no uncertain terms, don't take it.

Just tough it out.

That's negligent.

That's reckless.

It's wall.

One of Kentucky's best known doctors says ignoring science can cost lives.

>> You are federal soldiers.

They deserve just as much respect is any other soldier.

>> Could a Shelby County Farm hold the answers about a civil war massacre?

Production of Kentucky Edition is made possible in part by the KET Millennium Fund.

♪ ♪ >> Good Evening and welcome to Kentucky EDITION for this Wednesday, October, the first brand new month.

I'm Renee Shaw.

We thank you for winding down your Wednesday with Hamas.

The federal government shutdown continues.

Congress and the White House couldn't reach a budget agreement.

So the government shutdown at midnight as a new fiscal year began.

Democrats are demanding funding for health care subsidies that are expiring for millions of people under the Affordable Care Act.

It's expected that 750,000 government workers will end up furloughed.

President Donald Trump says he plans to fire some of them permanently.

So what does all this main the shutdown that is for Kentucky.

Here's more from our Jim Leffler.

>> Kentuckians can expect much to stay the same.

The mail will be delivered and workers can assist you at any local post office.

Seniors will still get their Social Security payments and veterans can access medical care at their VA hospitals and clinics with Fayette and Jefferson County students on fall break.

You might be wondering about travel plans at airports.

TSA agents and air traffic controllers are still on the job, but America's major airlines said, quote, the system may need to slow down.

Fires may face longer lines and some clothes checkpoints.

As for recreation, Kentucky is home to several national parks, including Mammoth Cave and Lincoln's birthplace.

Expect all welcoming and education centers to be closed.

But if you're camping out, especially if you already have in the needed permits, open air areas of parks are still accessible.

Just remember no one is picking up after you for Kentucky edition.

I'm June Leffler.

>> Thank you, June.

And here's a quote from Congressman Mark Morgan McGarvey, a Democrat from Kentucky's 3rd district.

It says, quote, Republicans control the White House, the House and the Senate.

And they're making it clear they would rather shut down the entire government, then pass a budget that actually gives families a figure shay and of quote, now this is from Republican Andy Barr of the 6 district.

He says, quote, House Republicans did our job.

We voted to KET the government open.

Democrats blocked it.

Chuck Schumer is shutting down the government to give taxpayer funded health care to illegal aliens, end quote.

Republican Thomas Massie of the 4th district says, quote, both parties are ridiculous and quote, he says the Republican budget isn't any different from President Biden's last budget.

U.S.

Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky made a similar point last night on the FOX Business Channel.

>> The American people need to know the debt problem is a bipartisan problem.

The current spending levels.

The irony is this.

It's going to be 2 trillion dollars in debt, but it's the same spending levels that we had under Biden.

So every Democrat in the Senate voted for this in December of last year.

What they're opposing now is what they all had previously voted for him.

And I don't think the full significance of that are and he has come forward.

They're voting against something they've all voted for previously.

>> U.S.

Senator Mitch McConnell said this, quote, I can't count the number of times I've had to remind Democrat colleagues that taking basic government functions hostage for partisan demands never pays.

The shutdown won't end until Democrats really learned this lesson for the sake of the American people.

I hope they do so quickly.

Quote.

And other news, the Kentucky Community and Technical College System and eastern Kentucky University say their new transfer partnership.

We'll make it easier and more affordable for students to continue their education.

Our Emily Sisk has more from E K you and our education matters.

Report.

>> We educate more Kentuckians than any other school in the state per capita.

And our guys just go back to work in a Kentucky communities at a higher rate than any other four-year institution.

>> Now, even more Kentuckians may study at a KU after the university announced a transfer partnership with the Kentucky Community and Technical College System which makes it easier and more affordable for students to continue their education.

Doctor tire Frank from Kctcs explain to some of the benefits of the transfer agreement.

No application fees for students, priority Registration.

>> Transfer scholarship opportunities.

Free textbooks and dedicated by saying the chain also offers a joint admissions opportunity while students are still taking community college courses, they can begin taking classes at the university.

They can take up to 12 credit hours at a KU while they're still with us at the kctcs tuition rate uses students one course a semester at you to help to the Ek.

You culture.

Those could be online.

They could face to face, but it just helps make that that transition to the university.

>> More students transfer from Kctcs to eat KU than any other university eastern.

Kentucky's president doctor David McFadden said that's because of qualities like affordability or Lee advising and a multitude of online programs.

For many, they're going to be online learners who may be transferring from online program.

It Kctcs.

That was the case for Kelly Mitchell who started working on her associate's degree at Kctcs.

>> During the pandemic might.

>> I do want it to go straight to a for a four-year college because I was pregnant.

My senior year in high school.

I kind of had to figure out something close to home and something them.

Willis, thank Michel was ready to continue her education on a college campus.

She applied early to the social work program at KU and to her surprise was quickly accepted before I even had got accepted for housing here in Richmond.

>> I was already accepted from my program.

Mitchell is now working on her master's in social work at eastern Kentucky University.

She said the support she received as a young mother at both Kctcs and Ek.

You encouraged her to KET going.

>> I started at Kctcs with a newborn baby and it took me 3 years to get an associate's degree.

So like sometimes it takes time and that's okay.

>> Leaders from both institutions said it's their goal to make education more accessible, affordable and show collaboration across the state.

>> It really is about these partnerships.

It's about collaboration is about working together in the best interest of students.

>> He can use president said he's excited to welcome more community and technical college students from Paducah to Pikeville for Kentucky edition.

I'm Emily Sisk.

Thank you, Emily.

Now turning to medical news.

Negligent, reckless and wrong.

That's how a top Kentucky doctor characterizes recent claims by the Trump administration associating Tylenol use during pregnancy to an increased risk of neurological conditions like autism in children.

That announcement last week drew a strong rebuke from Doctor Steven Stock, the secretary of the state health Cabinet who oversees health policy programs and services for Kentucky.

He says the administration's claims about acetaminophen use and autism are unproven and what's worse as stack.

He calls them dangerous.

I asked him yesterday about the origin of these climbs on what the science really says.

>> Well, there's long been a subset of people who have their concerns are skepticism, right?

That's that's always the case.

There's a small percentage who will feel that for whatever reasons they lack confidence in their certainty in the recommendations that are given by their health care providers or other experts.

That's always the case.

What unique now is that there's a growing number of people who are becoming uncertain because the very basis of fact and reality is being distorted for them.

They're being told information that is objectively wrong.

It's objectively false.

Take, for example, the Tylenol issue that's recently come up.

Tylenol is one of the only medications felt to be generally safe for women with Seaver and who are pregnant.

All right.

One of the only things generally felt to be safe and now they've been told in no uncertain terms, don't take it.

Just tough it out.

That's negligent.

That's reckless.

It's wrong.

It's it's going to cause people to get hurt that don't need to get hurt or people to suffer that don't need to suffer.

And now when women who are pregnant co to see their physicians, portion of them are going to be skeptical of their physician when they recommend.

But modern medical science has long said it's one of the safest medications they can use to help control fever and pain in pregnancy, which is acetaminophen or Tylenol.

>> Is there a study or series of studies that point to the the suspect nature of the seat of venom in use during pregnancy?

I mean, it had to have started from somewhere.

What is the origin story of a small lesion?

Yeah, there are lots of studies about acetaminophen in pregnancy.

One of the things in studies for pregnant women because it's considered not to be ethical to withhold treatment from one half of women.

And can you test one half and withhold from the other half in?

So there's not great research specifically in pregnant women because a liability and ethical reasons.

So we have to rely on as well because or facial studies.

We look at the large numbers of pregnant women who have made their own choices and then see how the I responded differently to different choices.

Those raises other problems, though, because a lot of other variables can come into play.

That confuse or confound the interpretation.

There have been many observation of studies for women who are pregnant using acetaminophen.

They have none of them showed a causal relationship or acetaminophen as in any way contributed to or caused autism in one of the largest ones with millions of women in Scandinavia showed absolutely no relationship whatsoever to the diagnosis of autism in the use of acetaminophen in pregnancy.

It is entirely irresponsible to suggest otherwise.

What we have now, Renee.

Used to be that if you had hundreds, hundreds scientific studies in 99 of them all lined up in a cluster in one was an outlier.

He would say, well, that's the outlier.

But but scientific evidence says this is clearly the right choice.

We have a group of people now that are saying that one outlier thats the truth, all the other 99 are lying and hiding something.

This is the truth.

It's entirely backwards.

Like I said, it's going to cause people to get hurt.

>> All of this is consequential not just to access but to affordability.

2 vaccinations, to medications.

Talk about how this becomes an access issue.

If it keeps progressing the way we see this conversation progressing.

So if this keeps progressing, people who don't need to get sick, get sick instead of paying pennies to a relatively speaking to immunize people.

Worker gives simple unsafe medications like acetaminophen or Tylenol in pregnant women.

>> What we end up doing is having complications.

You have kids get diseases that we had previously eliminated in the end up in the hospital, you know, did with dehydration or pneumonia or problems they didn't need to have you get a small number of them who die.

And that's a real tragedy because shun could prevent a that entirely.

You have elderly folks who if they become skeptical and they get don't get recommended immunizations, things for COVID or the flu.

And up in the hospital or end up in an ICU or end up on a ventilator and up deceased because they get serious diseases that they might otherwise have been protected against.

Bernie, I would say in human history in all of our human history, maybe there's 10,000 years of recorded human history, one way or the other.

The average human life expectancy as recently as 1900 worldwide was about 32 years of age in the United States.

There's probably in the late 40's.

Over the last one and a quarter centuries 125 years or so.

Life expectancy has more than doubled globally.

Increased by 30 or more years in United States.

That's all because of science.

It's all because of medicine.

If you want to see, but it looks like to eat an organic diet, not see a doctor and have no medicines.

All you have to do is go back to 1900.

We can all die under the age of 50 on average because that's what we had before that.

In a buyout expensive.

When first came around in 1940's, the first time into her potential medication, the 1950's immunizations.

We had some back into the 1800, you know, when George Washington, a man dies, just troops against smallpox.

So that's not brand new.

But the more commonly used ones really the 40's 50's 60's is when those really started to emerge, modern medical science has been what has made it possible along with sanitation and other things like that.

To have longer fuller, healthier lives.

>> Is there any benefit in your view of having this healthy skepticism about modern medicine, about vaccinations, about long policies that we've had a band of adopted that have given way to this longer life expectancy and and better health outcomes.

Is there some benefit to having a skeptical conversation about it?

I think there's always benefit for people asking questions.

>> I think there's benefit for experts who analyzed the same data and reach different conclusions to have an informed discussion and debate about water truce main most likely lie.

I think all of us need to be willing to revisit our conclusions when presented with evidence that suggests that our conclusion should be adjusted.

I think that's the scientific process.

I think that's just the hallmark of an enlightened educated society.

So, yes, it's always a role for that kind of discussion that the challenge comes in is when you have real experts who have stood a study done to devoted their entire lives to studying and trying to find truth.

And when they make recommendations based on the scientific method in doing an open, transparent way, what really gets alarming is when we now have our very public institutions deconstructed.

When we have experts fired from panels and replaced sometimes with cranks and we have people who are substituting quackery for real science in doing it on a very opaque way where they're not consulting not dealing in the open.

That stuff.

This recipe for real harm for all of us.

>> If there's any advice you could give Secretary Kennedy and the Trump administration, what would it be?

My advice would be more to our patients to the Kentuckyian said I served.

>> It would be please get professional medical advice from a qualified people that will be doctors and nurse practitioners and nurses and physician assistants and pharmacists.

Please go see people who are qualified, licensed health care practitioners and get your guidance from them.

Not from a bunch of people.

We have other agendas telling other stories more interest in having you confused and scared than they are about having you healthy and well, so please seek medical advice from real professionals.

>> The Food and Drug Administration has initiated the process for a label change to products containing acetaminophen.

Most notably time at all.

It is the only over-the-counter medication approved for treating fever in pregnancy.

A study published last year by the Journal of the American Medical Association found no increased risk of autism, ADHD or intellectual disabilities.

If the children of women who used acetaminophen during pregnancy.

♪ ♪ ♪ >> Housing is an ongoing crisis all across the country and especially in Kentucky.

>> And northern Kentucky, Covington city leaders are making an effort to get the community's input to solve the crisis.

Our Emily Sisca spoke with a northern Kentucky percent to about that.

And tonight's Reporter's Notebook.

>> We are joined now with Nathan Granger from Link Nky Nathan, thank you so much for being with us.

>> Thank you.

Happy to be here.

>> Absolutely.

So we're gonna talk about housing.

We know this is of course, a nationwide issue.

The shortage of housing is also affecting Northern Kentuckyian Covington.

Just want to start by asking you could tell us from your reporting, how did we get here?

>> So nationwide, there's a there's is a handful of trends.

The big one is essentially that the cost to build new housing is incredibly high.

The point that it's sort of incentivizes the building of these kind of larger properties that can then be sold for, you know, high.

Price.

When you talk about Covington, you have that phenomenon.

But then you also have the fact that in Covington specifically there's not a lot of developable land.

If you're looking to increase the amount of accessible housing that inevitably is going to entail, confronted the density problem, whether that's building thing, you know, housing units on top of each other or looking at.

>> For smaller, like tiny homes, war, manufactured homes or or something that would allow the city to better utilize the limited amount of space that it has.

>> And we know from your reporting, you said that Covington's Mayor Ron Washington, Israeli said housing is one of his number one priorities.

That was when he came in and still is now.

So they hosted a community forum about housing earlier this week really invited anyone to come out from attendees who were there, what were some of their common?

No concerns with thoughts about housing.

>> What was nice about this particular meeting was that there were different different levels of Covington, sort of life there.

You had 10 and she had homeowners who had landlords business owners.

One of the things that kind of rumbles behind everything is just the general affordability of housing.

The fact that it's so expensive to get it White House and rinse are going up.

When we talk about this aspect of affordability, we so we say that's often right.

Like income aligned, affordable housing.

>> Is there any thought in a place like Covington?

What does that actually look like?

Are there any numbers that are shared as far as the dollar amount of affordable housing?

>> The average sales price in Covington in 2025.

Was $288,000.

If you compare that to the average sales price and 2017 the average sales price of that year was a just was about 130,000.

The median household income in Covington is a just over 15,000.

What they're aiming is to help people in those income ranges.

Get access to.

Whether that rental or but has it seems one of the >> main solutions the city has proposed is to look at.

They can't or abandoned properties and how can may convert that into housing.

Can you tell us more about that?

Is that something that city officials talked about?

>> Yes, in fact, that's sort of that's kind of eating.

>> Underlying philosophy of this new housing initiative, which is the city itself owns a lot of properties.

There's also kind of a neglected in dilapidated properties.

>> Properties which means on them to just recently the city foreclosed on 12.

It's just a cluster is a property and some some of them have multiple lots.

They just started started to foreclose on that land with the hopes that the money that the city raises from that can then fund construction of affordable housing in and around the city.

We know this is an ongoing issue on to mention we're really out of the first phases of finding a solution for Covington.

>> So we will certainly KET our finger on the pulse of housing and KET in touch with you to learn about what's happening in northern Kentucky.

Nathan Granger with a link Nky.

Thank you for your reporting and keeping us in the loop.

All right.

Thank you.

>> And thank you, Emily, Kentucky farm could hold the key to a mystery dating back to the Civil War.

22 soldiers with the 5th U.S.

Collard Calvary.

Many formerly enslaved were attacked and killed by Confederate guerrillas while on their way to Louisville.

Their bodies were never found.

Local archaeologists and historians began their search almost 20 years ago.

A search that brought them to a farm in Simpsonville Monday where they dug up earth trying to uncover some answers.

>> Right now is the culmination of about 18 years of research and work here.

We are looking for the remains of 22 men from the 5th United States Colored Cavalry company.

E who were killed in January.

25th 18.

65 by elders.

>> They would talk about it, Mike, my grandfather.

He was born in an ox.

89 is and his actual father and uncle lived here.

They didn't watch the battle, but they were aware that the commotion he actually.

>> What I've understood KET where the burial site maybe, but as time went by memories faded.

I just wish I had been able to talk had sense enough to thought when I was a kid, I asked my grandfather what they can show me.

>> Pretty much exactly where the places but see my father and I neither one of us did that.

So like say then we thought it was last.

Kentucky Archeology survey is here there.

Some forensic archaeologist they're looking >> Could be lather from foods if the votes were stolen.

>> It could be it could be bones.

>> A couple years ago, Jerry reached out to me again said they had found in the 1936 Highway map.

>> That was mark Civil war burial mound and it was right out here in this field.

We're just not seeing those soil differences we should expect to find.

And since we know that there are at least 22 men that are buried here, the number of trends as we put across there, we would have found at least some soil difference even if we didn't find human remains or buttons, we would have seen the soil changes that would have let us know that there was a burial trench there.

The fact that they're not there is a little disappointing, but we're not going to give up.

We're going to continue this process.

We know they should be somewhere between the top of this hill in the bottom of the sale.

So we may see some additional geophysics.

There's some other places in the cemetery where he didn't look, we have some newer technologies.

We might try to take him to the cemetery to look and go from there.

The process is, but if we verify is if they archaeologist verify that these are human remains, the remains will be reinterred.

>> At the National Cemetery and Camp Nelson in Jeff Jessamine County.

So they can properly memorialized with military honors because they died for their country.

That not only did they die for their freedom because Martin, virtually all of them or sleigh in sight.

Went to the recruiting office either in Louisville or in Camp Nelson in Jessamine County enlisted and they got their freedom when they took that of the military.

And eventually they would have got the freedom of their loved ones as well.

>> The soldiers deserve the right to be buried properly and the recognition like any other soldier, whether it be from Vietnam.

Corey, a second first World War and they deserve a where you are federal soldiers.

They deserve just as much respect is any other soldier of the United States.

I want them to know that we will continue to look for them to tell their We won't leave them behind at least as long as I'm around.

>> We will continue to try to find these men so we can tell their stories.

>> The PBS series Secrets of the Dead featured a story on this Simpsonville massacre that it was co-produced by KET.

You can see that episode by streaming it online on demand at KET DOT Org.

Slash program slashed secrets of the dead.

♪ >> And Northern Kentucky hospital has been praised as one of Kentucky's best.

And it has big new plants.

>> Our vision is to lead our communities to be among the healthiest in the nation.

We are absolutely dedicated to taking care of patients, not just for acute needs, but for preventative care.

Overall, health, maintenance and improvement.

>> We'll go to Saint Elizabeth's newest location in Boone County.

That's tomorrow on Kentucky EDITION, which we hope that you'll join us for again at 6.30, Eastern 5.30, central where we inform connect and inspire.

We hope that he'll connect with us all the ways you see on your screen by Facebook X, formerly known as Twitter and Instagram to stay in the loop.

You can also look for us on the PBS and KET app that you can download on your smart devices.

And we always encourage you to send us a story idea by email to public affairs at KET DOT Org.

I'm Renee Shaw.

Thank you for being with us tonight.

And I hope to see you right back here again tomorrow night.

Take good care.

♪