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Many Fire Department employees who survived the World Trade Center attacks and then devoted weeks and sometimes months to searching for the remains of colleagues and others who perished there were convinced that the time spent breathing in the toxins pervading the site had done significant and permanent damage to their lungs.
Unfortunately for them, they were right in that perception. A joint study by the FDNY and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine that was published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine found that most of them not only suffered the loss of lung function in the first six months after 9/11 but had failed to regain it in the years since then. A Professor of Medicine at Einstein, Dr. Thomas Aldrich, said this ran contrary to previous studies of firefighter exposure to toxins that showed a gradual recovery from the damage rendered. In this instance, he noted, the density of the smoke they had to deal with -"a particulate cloud so thick that you can't even see through it"-represented a profound difference from what is encountered at other fires.
The firefighter unions have pointed to another issue that compounded the health risk: a delay of three months in providing air-purifying respirators to those working on "The Pile," while firefighters routinely don air masks when fighting fires inside a building.
The study reduces to ho-hum status an article published in Sunday's New York Post with the blaring headline "FDNY $oak-eaters" that made a big deal of the fact that 80 percent of the firefighters of all ranks who have retired so far this year did so on disability pensions that provide them with threequarters of their final pay annually. The effects of the time spent at Ground Zero made it inevitable that there would be an increase in disability pensions in the department, since every member of the firefighting force spent at least a month there.
Uniformed Firefighters Association President Steve Cassidy raised a more-sobering concern following the publication of the study in the prestigious medical journal: that lurking further down the road are cancers that will emerge as the result of the damage done to lungs and other parts of the body exposed to the Trade Center toxins.
It makes it that much more imperative that Congress act on the James Zadroga bill, named for a former Detective believed to have died as a result of his tenure at Ground Zero. The measure, which is this week being considered by the U.S. House of Representatives Energy Committee, if approved would offer permanent Federal funding for post-9/11 monitoring and treatment.
As Pat Bahnken, president of Emergency Medical Service Local 2507 of District Council 37, told this newspaper's Ari Paul, "For any Congressperson who reads this [study] and does not fully understand the need for the Zadroga bill, then they're just out of touch with reality."
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