Why are Ground Zero workers getting sick?

[IRiSHMaFIA]

By Randi Kaye
CNN

NEW YORK -- Could this be a coincidence? Is this for real? How will we ever know? Those are just some of the questions I asked myself when writing about workers and emergency responders from Ground Zero who now claim they're sick from the toxic cocktail to which they were exposed.

I got to know two guys in particular. They are former New York Police Department detectives Rich Volpe and John Wolcott, partners for 11 years in the narcotics division.

They worked together on the pile at the World Trade Center site for nine months. Now Wolcott has leukemia and Volpe has double kidney failure. Both blame their illnesses on the toxins at Ground Zero, like benzene and dioxin.

They weren't given respirators to wear, they say, until weeks into the cleanup, only to be told that the respirators had the wrong filters and they would need new ones to properly protect themselves.

Wolcott told me black soot would spill out of his ears in the shower and onto his pillow at night for months. The shower floor, he said, looked like the bottom of a barbecue grill.

Doctors at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City are operating the largest screening program of its kind for 9/11 responders. We spoke to Dr. Stephen Levin, who heads the program.

He acknowledges seeing a rise in respiratory ailments and concludes that is from the dust and the poisonous air at the site. But Dr. Levin will not go so far as to say there is a direct link between cancers that are developing in responders and their work at Ground Zero five years ago.

I asked Dr. Levin how long it normally takes for cancer to develop in someone exposed to these toxins. "There is generally a minimum of 15 years that has to pass from the exposure to a cancer-causing agent to the time you can really diagnose that cancer. And frankly, in most cancer types, that latency period, that delay, is more often 20 and 25 years," he said.

So what are we to make of this? Could this be some horrible coincidence? Could these people have been predisposed to these cancers? One attorney I interviewed, David Worby, said he has 8,000 clients who got sick at Ground Zero. More than 60 of them are already dead, he said.

On top of this, there is the political backpedaling taking place behind the scenes. Why were workers allowed on the site if the air was dangerous?

Former EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman said in 2001, "If there's any good news out of all this, it's that everything we've tested for, which includes asbestos, lead and VOC's [volatile organic compounds] have been below any level of concern for the general public health. Obviously, for those who are down there, these [respirators] are very important."

But this week, in an interview with 60 Minutes, Whitman blamed the City of New York, saying it was the city's job to make sure workers were protected.

Former Deputy Mayor Joe Lhota told CNN: "The city repeatedly instructed workers on the pile to use their respirators." The city says it supplied more than 200,000 respirators to responders.

The challenges for the people who are sick just keep coming. Their claims are being denied by insurance companies and many are too sick to work. They don't have 20 years to wait for a conclusion to be made about how and why they are sick. And the funding for Mount Sinai's study may run out in a few years anyway. They need help now. And they want some answers.

___________________________________________

I've seen a couple shows about this now and it really bothers me that nobody is helping all these people that are so sick from the toxins at ground zero.

They worked round the clock for weeks on end and could hardly breathe whilst working among the fumes and such, but never gave up looking for remains and helping with the clean up.

So many millions of dollars have been donated by corporations and the private sector, and you'd think something would go towards helping these people out?

It seems everyone's turned their backs on them and I find that deplorable.

[Gasman59]

I agree Irish !!! One sentence in that story really makes you think...

[faceless]

The bunch of lying bastards in (corporate controlled) government couldn't care less about who dies - not one jot. All their shit about protecting the population is just that; shit. They only care about maintaining their power institutions - human lives are irrelevant to them.

Many of these honest workers will die only because banks and other corporations wanted their reserves of gold, platinum etc. I pointed out at the time how wrong the fact that many firemen were pulled off the job as soon as a large store of platinum was found was, but I was accused of being a trouble-maker. The firemen themselves complained that they wanted to stay on to find their friends who had been lost, but, in harsh reality, they were only really there to find the corporate bastards' stuff and it sickened me. And now there's a good chance that corporate greed will potentially result in more deaths than the acts which brought down the towers in the first place.

I'm guessing that, in great corporate tradition, no one will take responsibility for this and it will just be ignored or denied in the same way as Gulf War Syndrome has been.

The fucking bastards.

[Gasman59]

Totally agree Face !!!!