Why Did "Our" EPA Say It Was "Safe"?
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Why Did "Our" EPA Say It Was "Safe"?
Date:
Tue, 17 Sep 2002 16:39:37 -0400
From:
Stephen Tvedten <steve@getipm.com>
Organization: Get Set Inc. (www.getipm.com)
To: Paul Helliker <phelliker@cdpr.ca.gov>
Director, State of California, Department of Pesticide
Regulation
cc: Christine Whitman whitman.christine@epa.gov
Respiratory Ills Plague Ground Zero Workers Many Who Breathed Fumes
Face Disability, Grim Recovery Rates.
By Christine Haughney, Washington Post Staff Writer - Monday,
September 16, 2002; Page A03.
NEW YORK -- Age never seemed to catch up with consummate New Yorker Michael Burke, 43. He flourished on little more than four hours of sleep a night, working as a carpenter and bartender, chauffeuring his four daughters to activities, jogging in the Bronx's Van Cortlandt Park four times a week and playing Gaelic football for his native County Sligo team.
That routine ended abruptly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and his six-week stint at Ground Zero, where he built ramps for firefighters so their hoses wouldn't be run over and helped reinstall blown-out windows in nearby buildings.
By early October, Burke couldn't stop wheezing and coughing. At the end of the month, doctors discovered he had airway dysfunction and dead muscle ringing the outer edges of his heart.
"They diagnosed me as disabled for the rest of my days," he said, before heading back to Ireland to recuperate at his parents' home. "You still think you're superman. But you just can't do it."
A year after the Sept. 11 attacks, medical studies are showing that hundreds of World Trade Center rescue workers are still struggling with respiratory problems. For firefighters, one of the better documented groups, illnesses have necessitated lengthy medical leaves.
With last year's collapse of the two 110-story towers came a toxic plume of dust and debris. In the weeks after the attacks, many New Yorkers pressed through their recovery efforts with little more protective gear than flimsy paper masks. As the fires burned for months, and workers and residents shared the same rackety cough, many New Yorkers speculated about the amount of asbestos, lead and mercury in the gray dust coating Lower Manhattan.
Initially the Environmental Protection Agency insisted that the air was clean enough to work and live in Lower Manhattan, releasing select results to confirm the assertions.
But reports in the New York Daily News and in The Washington Post found that residents and scientists had their own battery of tests showing that the air contained elevated levels of lead and asbestos.
While private Wall Street companies commissioned crews to professionally clean their offices, many downtown residents were left to clean the pulverized debris coating their homes themselves. On May 8, the EPA announced it would provide cleanup and testing to downtown residents.
Doctors see new cases of persistent respiratory problems among those who labored at Ground Zero every day. And the numbers of the afflicted could be much higher than reported -- union officials say not enough workers have sought out the federally funded screening programs.
"My main concern is for the membership to go out and get checked," said Angelo Scagnelli, a business agent for the Cement Masons Union Local 780.
Scagnelli spent 45 years working on the city's largest construction projects, including the World Trade Center. He now suffers from asbestosis and can count on his thick fingers the co-workers who have died from his condition and assorted cancers.
He encourages the younger masons who worked on the World Trade Center cleanup to get their lungs checked. But they are often reticent.
"They don't even want you to know sometimes how sick they are," he said.
"They just go to work and they don't want you even to know."
For Ground Zero's firefighters, recovery rates are grimmer than physicians and researchers had expected.
About half of the 358 firefighters who developed the "World Trade Center cough" remain on medical leave or light duty, according to a study of 10,116 firefighters published in the New England Journal of Medicine's Sept. 12 issue.
Although no firefighters have retired from respiratory problems, nearly 500 firefighters may have to retire by year's end because of their failing health.
"We have had persistent symptoms and some people just not have improved at all," Kerry Kelly, chief medical officer of the New York City Fire Department, said at a Sept. 9 New York Academy of Medicine panel. "It's been discouraging."
Similar numbers of workers involved with the recovery and reconstruction have reported respiratory problems.
Mount Sinai Hospital's Irving J. Selikoff Center for Occupational and Environmental Medicine has treated 600 patients, from office workers caught in the dust clouds to fire and construction workers. About 60 percent of them suffer persistent upper and lower respiratory problems.
Nearly 15 percent of the clinic's patients remain sensitive to bus exhaust, cigarette smoke and temperature changes after a year of treatment.
With six full-time physicians seeing patients five days a week, Mount Sinai's clinic has a two-month waiting list for new patients. But medical director Stephen M. Levin still encourages these people to come.
He said he has seen too many patients misdiagnosed by primary care doctors unfamiliar with treating serious chemical burns. "It doesn't leave us confident that they will get appropriate evaluation and care," Levin said.
Burke, whose union has about two dozen members complaining of respiratory problems, encourages his co-workers to get checked out.
After visiting a handful of private doctors who misdiagnosed and mistreated his condition, Burke said he found help at the Mount Sinai clinic.
But his breathing and lung capacity are far from normal. Before Burke went to Ireland, he was devoting his days to filling out workmen's compensation forms, lingering in doctor's waiting rooms for appointments and following a daily regimen of four heart and lung medications.
He has realized that for now he no longer can bang nails, run the length of a soccer field or carry his daughter's desk up a flight of stairs. He is trying to find a new profession, writing and taking photographs for a local Irish newspaper. But how much he does each day is guided by his health.
"I was never sick in my life. I didn't even have any doctors," he said.
"It has changed everything."
© 2002 The Washington Post Company
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