As they push their investigation into the health risks to workers in the recovery and cleanup operations at ground zero, medical detectives are focusing on a group of lung diseases that can lead to long-term disabilities and, in some cases, death.
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Tracing Lung Ailments That Rose With 9/11 Dust
May 13, 2006
By ANTHONY DePALMA
By ANTHONY DePALMA
As they push their investigation into the health risks to workers in the recovery and cleanup operations at ground zero, medical detectives are focusing on a group of lung diseases that can lead to long-term disabilities and, in some cases, death.
After nearly five years, it is still too early for these doctors, scientists and forensic pathologists to say with certainty whether any long-term cancer threat came with exposure to the toxic cloud unleashed by the trade center collapse. But there are already clear signs that the dust, smoke and ash that responders breathed in have led to an increase in diseases that scar the lungs and reduce their capacity to take in and let out air.
The Fire Department tracked a startling increase in cases of a particular lung scarring disease, known as sarcoidosis, among firefighters, which rose to five times the expected rate in the two years after Sept. 11. Though that rate has declined, doctors worry that the disease may be lurking in other firefighters. Experts who regularly see workers who were at ground zero in the 48 hours after the towers’ collapse expect monitoring to show many more cases of lung- scarring disorders among that group.
New evidence also suggests that workers who arrived later or worked on the periphery may also be susceptible to debilitating lung ailments.
“We have thousands of people who were down there with unprotected exposures,” said Dr. Stephen M. Levin, a director of the World Trade Center Worker and Volunteer Medical Screening Program. “Many will develop asthma and a few will develop this terrible lung scarring that leads to disability or death.”
But even in diseases closely related to dust, making a binding connection to ground zero exposure is hard. For instance, the Fire Department has linked sarcoidosis to working at the trade center site, while the Police Department has not.
The clues that led to this new area of medical investigation were stark reminders of what was lost on Sept. 11. They are drawn from cases of statistically unexpected respiratory disease among young responders.
The ailments now seen are far more serious than the general hacking and congestion known as “World Trade Center cough” that initially hit most responders. Rather, these are a set of diseases and disorders that typically take a few years to develop, and in some cases get progressively worse.
The most worrisome to medical experts are granulomatous pulmonary diseases, which show a particular type of swirling marks left on the lungs by foreign matter like dust. Doctors say the severity of the disease is often dictated by a patient’s genetic makeup. The diseases include pulmonary fibrosis and sarcoidosis, a sometimes fatal disorder that can be set off when exposure to dust causes the body’s immune system to attack itself.
Some people can live with the scarring if they limit their activities, but in others the exposure to foreign material sets off a cascade of ailments that can lead to more debilitating conditions and, eventually, death. Detective James Zadroga, 34, died in January when his badly scarred lungs weakened and his heart gave out. The coroner’s report gave the cause of death as “granulomatous pneumonitis,” and the autopsy found swirls throughout his lungs caused by foreign material consistent with dust.
Detective Zadroga’s death was the first to be officially linked by an autopsy report to exposure to the ground zero dust, although the electronmicroscope comparisons that could have proved the match beyond a reasonable doubt were not done by the coroner’s office.
The Uniformed Firefighters Association earlier this year linked the deaths of two firefighters and a battalion chief — from lung disease and respiratory ailments — to the air at ground zero, although the Fire Department itself has not formally acknowledged that those deaths were connected to ground zero work. And three young emergency medical technicians who worked in the dust and smoke at ground zero have died from pulmonary diseases and coronary problems aggravated by their battered lungs, according to the u nion that represented them.
The use of respirators and dust masks might have reduced the incidence of respiratory ailments, but the most effective ones issued to firefighters are meant to last only 20 minutes. Other responders and volunteers who arrived after the first two days did not use dust masks at all or were only given paper masks, an issue raised in a pending class-action suit against the city and private companies involved in the cleanup.
Although the reported cases of lung disease affect a tiny portion of the 40,000 people who responded to the trade center collapse, they have already caused widespread concern among the survivors, lending urgency to medical efforts to understand the risks and illnesses involved.
“When these cases come to public attention, every individual down there who has some problem breathing thinks, ‘I’m next,’ ” said Dr. Levin, a professor at Mount Sinai School of Medicine.
Dr. Levin’s screening program offers the most complete picture of the health consequences of Sept. 11, apart from statistics maintained by the Fire Department on the firefighters. Nearly 12,000 u nion employees and other workers who were exposed to the trade center dust and debris have been examined.
Dr. Levin said that more than 60 percent of those people developed respiratory problems like sinusitis. He said continued monitoring was beginning to suggest that more serious lung problems might follow; he will complete a new epidemiological study of responders in a few months.
In testimony before a Congressional committee in February, Dr. Kerry J. Kelly, chief medical officer of the Fire Department, outlined the department’s concerns about lung diseases. She said one responder awaiting a lung transplant had died of pulmonary fibrosis. And the department was alarmed to find that 20 firefighters had come down with sarcoidosis in the first two years after Sept. 11, “a substantial increase from prior years” that was believed to be linked to “massive dust inhalation” at ground zero.
The high rate, five times the expected level, has since returned to the expected range — a clear sign, doctors say, of a link to Sept. 11. But there is still cause for concern. The disease may take longer to develop in some people than others, doctors said, just as certain groups — including Northern Europeans and African-Americans — have been shown to have a higher incidence of sarcoidosis than the general population.
Medical experts say that proving that exposure to a known toxin caused an illness is notoriously difficult, even in situations where the hazards are as obvious as the thunderhead of dust and smoke that rolled through Lower Manhattan on Sept. 11 and lingered over the rubble pile for weeks.
In some cases, making such links causes so much discord that government agencies have come to conflicting conclusions, extending the misery of those involved.
For example, firefighters who have developed sarcoidosis since Sept. 11 are thought to have contracted the disease because of their work at ground zero. Yet the Police Pension Board has ruled that working at ground zero did not cause the death of a police officer who developed the disease.
“This rift between the Police and Fire Departments is ridiculous,” said Michelle Haskett-Godbee, whose husband, Police Officer James J. Godbee Jr., died in December 2004. She said that Officer Godbee, who had worked at or near ground zero for more than 850 hours, suddenly developed a hacking cough and grew progressively weaker, although he had to keep working.
After his lung collapsed in March 2004, Officer Godbee, a former marine and 19-year police veteran, grew frail and listless. In the weeks before he died, he could barely get out of an easy chair at his Stuyvesant Town apartment, Mrs. Godbee said.
The autopsy done by the New York medical examiner’s office found that Officer Godbee’s lungs were pitted with the blisters and scars caused by sarcoidosis.
Despite the Fire Department’s well-researched information on sarcoidosis, the Police Pension Board last June denied Mrs. Godbee’s application for a line-of-duty death benefit, which would have provided her widow’s benefits — equal to half her husband’s annual salary — every year for the rest of her life. The board said that sarcoidosis is “not known to be related to employment in the police force.”
Mrs. Godbee said her husband worked multiple shifts over several months in the area below Canal Street that was clouded in dust from the collapsed buildings. He often came home with the stench on his clothes, and he was never given anything but a paper mask for protection.
“There’s no way you can’t get sick after smelling all that dust and dirt,” said Mrs. Godbee, a school guidance counselor.
Her lawyer, John Patrick Rudden, is trying to force the Fire Department to open the medical records of the firefighters with sarcoidosis, in the belief that such information would strengthen Mrs. Godbee’s legal challenge of the pension board decision.
Michael T. Murray, general counsel of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, said he expected the appeal to succeed because “the government can’t treat two similarly positioned people differently.”
Paul J. Browne, a police spokesman, did not defend the board’s decision, but he said police officers were usually not exposed to the same smoke and dust as firefighters. He said it was the board, which includes medical experts, and not the department that made pension decisions.
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Re: NYS DOH Publishes Fiction
Re: NYS DOH Publishes Fiction
I’m not sure this is fiction – except for the bullet that says no businesses have been negatively impacted, which is fiction and a bald-faced lie.
It’s just that the places the Antis choose to go to may not be affected, and that’s all these hypocrites care about.
If you can’t smoke anywhere in public, including privately owned establishments, then of course there is going to be less exposure to second-hand smoke. If you move from the city and live on a mountain, you’re going to be a lot less exposed to car exhaust. What does this “study” prove but the obvious. This article says absolutely nothing. It says nothing about whether people’s health has actually improved. All it says is that people are not exposed to SHS. In fact, the only health consequences it cites relate to children, who aren’t supposed to be in a bar anyway.
What the Antis have done is move beyond the primary question of whether SHS poses any health risk to begin with. They’ve successfully got a majority of people to believe without question that it does. Their problem, though, is that they have painted themselves into a corner by elevating the “danger” of SHS to mustard gas or anthrax. If we are to believe their own “science”, then tobacco should be outlawed completely, and they can’t – and won’t – defend that position. They are caught in a contradiction.
The question I pose, and the Antis always avoid since they can’t answer it, is why we didn’t see these SHS deaths a generation ago – or even longer – when 50% more of the population smoked and smoking was prevalent everywhere. That may be a point we don’t stress enough.
Richard
Des Moines, Iowa
