ABC News article on firefighter health, Jan 2002

NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document

ABCNI-WS.com http://printerfriendly.abcnews.com/printerfriendly/Print?fetchFrom...

the lungs. Gribbon said that even when respirators were available, some firefighters chose not to wear them. The equipment is uncomfortable, he said, and makes communication difficult.

Respirator use by workers at Ground Zero improved after the first few days but "could certainly be better," said Dr. Philip J, Landrigan, chair of the department of community and preventive medicine at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.

Noting that the trade center disaster is "bigger than anything we've seen before," Landrigan said nobody can predict completely what the long-term consequences will be for worker health.

Among the substances that escaped from the 1.2 million tons of debris at Ground Zero are asbestos, benzene, dioxin, and polychlorinated biphenyls, known as PCBs. These are linked to cancer, although experts said in many cases the exposures were low enough that the risk appears to be small.

Asbestos Concern

Private researchers who examined the interiors of apartments and offices near ground zero have found considerably higher levels of asbestos contamination than those reported by state and federal officials whose tests involved outdoor air samples, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported in today’s editions.

The private tests found nine asbestos fibers for every one detected by the Environmental Protection Agency, said Cate Jenkins, a senior chemist in the EPA's hazardous waste division.

"If people continue living and working in places that still have dust in the carpets, furniture, drapes and heating and cooling system, these fibers will continue to be resuspended [in the air]," Jenkins told the Post-Dispalch.

Recently, four Port Authority police officers who worked at the site were reassigned after they showed elevated levels of mercury in their blood. It wasn't clear whether the mercury came from Ground Zero, and the officers were in good health, officials said. Gribbon said no elevated mercury has been detected in firefighters, who are getting special medical evaluations because of their search and rescue roles at the scene.

Landrigan said his top concern is asbestos. Some 20 years or more after exposure, it can cause mesothelioma, a rare cancer affecting the sac lining of the chest or abdomen. Most people with the disease have worked in jobs where they breathed asbestos. Asbestos exposure can also cause lung cancer.

It's hard to say how big the mesothelioma threat is, Landrigan said, because nobody knows how many workers were exposed to various levels of asbestos.

And the exposure isn't over yet. Every time a worker picks up a beam that contains asbestos, "that stuff is kicked into the air" and could be inhaled by workers who aren't wearing proper protection, he said.

Still, Dr. Stephen Levin, medical director of Mount Sinai's Irving J. Selikoff Center for Occupational and Environmental Medicine, said he believes the risk of asbestos-related disease in Ground Zero workers is relatively low. While he doesn’t want to trivialize their exposures, he said, they are lower and briefer than the typical lifetime exposures seen in construction workers.

As for dioxins and benzene, Landrigan said they probably pose much less risk than asbestos, and Levin said he suspected the risk from those chemicals and PCBs is small.

Dust Danger

A key concern experts cite is dust — a mix of such things as pulverized concrete and fibrous glass, and mineral dust, mixed with irritating gases. Dust can cause respiratory problems that last a lifetime.

Levin said doctors at his medical center have found more than a dozen people who, in the wake of the disaster, experienced a first episode of asthma. The cause isn’t clear, but it could be dust, gases or a combination.

The problem has appeared in rescue workers and people who were just nearby when the disaster happened. The worst cases have shown up in people caught in the dust cloud that spread from the collapse.

When asthma is triggered that way. Levin said, the lungs can become more reactive to other im’tants like cigarette smoke and bus exhaust, or just going from a warm room to cold outdoor air. So some of the new asthma cases may end up as lifetime, chronic disease, he said.

But with quick treatment, he said, it’s reasonable to hope that won't happen.

Similarly, doctors have also seen workers and others near the site develop sinusitis, an inflammation of the sinus linings that can cause facial pain, stuffy nose and a persistent cough. Levin said. Again, that can turn into a chronic lifelong

3 01'4 1/15/2002 10:00 AM

NYC-VVTC_000152040