Please Explain (The Leonard Lopate Show)

Liberia, Guinea,  and Sierra Leone have been trying since March to stop what has become the largest Ebola outbreak ever recorded—as of August 6, 932 people have died from the disease and more than 1,700 people have been sickened. There have been cases in Nigeria and two Americans who came down with the disease while treating patients in West Africa are being treated in Atlanta. For this week’s Please Explain, W. Ian Lipkin, John Snow Professor of Epidemiology and director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, talks about the Ebola outbreak and how other infectious diseases outbreaks are contained and halted.

Fresh produce is plentiful all summer long and there are many ways to preserve it for the rest of the year. Daniel Gritzer explains how to freeze, can, pickle, or dry fruits and vegetables. Gritzer is Culinary Director at Serious Eats and he offers advice on how to make summer’s bounty last into winter’s dark days.

This week's Please Explain is all about how exposure to the sun affects our skin--from tanning to sunburn, from freckles to skin cancers. Dr. Jennifer Stein, of NYU Langone Medical Center's Ronald O. Perelman Department of Dermatology, talks about UV rays, sunscreen, and the cell damage that exposure to the sun causes over time.

This week’s Please Explain, Dr. Michael J. Balick of the New York Botanical Garden talks about herbs! He’ll explain how to grow them and use them in cooking, medicine, cleaning, and more, and he’ll discuss the relationship between humans, plants, and culture. He’s the author of the new book Rodale's 21st-Century Herbal: A Practical Guide for Healthy Living Using Nature's Most Powerful Plants.

Airbnb, which allows people to rent out a room or home online, has turned into a worldwide hospitality industry, with 600,000 listings in 34,000 cities and 190 countries. It’s a growing presence in New York City, but many politicians claim that the majority of Airbnb’s business here is illegal. New York State Senator Liz Krueger explains what is legal—and illegal—about using Airbnb in NYC, what the company is doing to try to change laws in Albany, and how that will affect landlords and tenants in the future.

When is hosting on Airbnb illegal? It is not illegal to host on Airbnb if you own a single family home or two family home, or rent out a room in your apartment while you stay there. But if you live in a permanent residential apartment building and rent out your entire apartment for less than thirty days, you are breaking the law. "And that’s the vast majority, we think, of listers on Airbnb,” Krueger said. “I can’t find a lease or bylaw in the city of New York that allows you to do short term subletting without permission from your board or your landlord. It violates state law… it violates zoning ordinances, it violates tax law.”

“Thousands of models” are removed from residential use as a result of short term rentals, Krueger said. “People go and rent [up to] 25 units, and just become entrepreneurial illegal hotellers,… Every single one of those units is being taken off the market for people desperately trying to find affordable housing.”

Hosting on Airbnb could lead to a rise in evictions for renters who might not know that they are breaking the law and their lease. “We have begged AirBNB and the other companies: put the laws up on the website,” Krueger said. “You have a legal obligation to let people know what they might be walking into.”

Neighbors are also affected. Krueger gives an example of a typical complaint: an elderly woman who knows everyone in the building, who tells Krueger: “now people I don’t know have keys to the building. They’re in my elevators. They’re partying late at night. I’m scared. There’s no one to complain to when things go wrong, because the person who’s supposed to be in that apartment isn’t.”

What are other affordable options for people who want to visit New York City? “I am hoping that the city, and this administration, will take seriously the proposal to create for-profit hostels,” Krueger said. “We actually have a law that doesn’t allow hostels, which are all over Europe and all over the country, which offer a safe hotel model at a lower cost.”

But some listeners were skeptical that housing laws are being enforced equally. Andrew from Brooklyn called in to say that landlords violate city law all the time and rarely get penalized, but the city is cracking down on Airbnb hosts. “I’m very suspicious how much this is being driven by the hotel industry, and politicians are taking the hotel money and doing their bidding.”

Katharine B. Nielson, chief education officer at Voxy, discusses how we learn languages, why it can get more difficult to learn new languages as we get older, and why the challenge of learning a language is good for our brains.

On this week’s Please Explain, Urvashi Rangan, director of the Consumer Safety and Sustainability Group for Consumer Reports, discusses the findings from Consumer Reports' new survey about food labels, and explains what terms like "natural," "fair trade," "genetically engineered," mean. She’ll explain the rules for what food labels can claim, how they can be misleading, what information is missing from labels, and efforts to reform food labels.

Acoustical engineer Trevor Cox, author of The Sound Book: The Science of the Sonic Wonders of the World, discusses acoustics, how sound works, and his hunt for the world’s strangest sounds.

Leave your questions as a comment, below, or call us at 212-433-9692.

The Weather Channel's four-day pollen forecast for New York notes that grass pollen is high, tree pollen is moderate. For the many who people suffer from seasonal allergies, spring brings sneezing and sniffling. So on this week's Please Explain, Dr. Clifford Bassett, Medical Director of Allergy and Asthma Care of New York, tells us why and what we can do to find relief:

On this week's Please Explain we'll find out how the human eye works and how it enables us to see the world around us. Dr. George A. Cioffi, Chairman and Ophthalmologist-in-Chief of the Department of Ophthalmology at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center, tells us how to keep our eyes healthy; why our vision changes; and how problems like glaucoma, cataracts, and macular degeneration affect our vision.