Study: 70 Percent of 9/11 Responders Suffer Lung Ailments

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Study: 70 Percent of 9/11 Responders Suffer Lung Ailments

JUAN GONZALEZ: On September 13th, 2001, two days after the 9/11 attacks, EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman made this announcement at Ground Zero.

CHRISTINE TODD WHITMAN: Well, if there's any good news out of all this, it’s that everything we’ve tested for, which includes asbestos, lead and BOCs, have been below any level of concern for the general public health.

DR. JACQUELINE MOLINE: Well, in the nearly 10,000 people that we report on in our study, we found that seven out of ten people had respiratory effects when they were at the site. And of those 70%, 60% still had symptoms when they were seen up to two-and-a-half years after the event. We found that half of -- we found about 30% of people had abnormal breathing tests. That’s twice what we would expect in the general population.

What's disturbing about that is, the people in our study aren't the general population. These are people who are in physically demanding jobs, so we would assume that their pulmonary function would be better than the general population, which includes everyone in our population, so people who aren't able to work, for example. We found that a specific breathing test of forced vital capacity, how much air you can take into your lungs, was five times more likely to be abnormal in our nonsmokers, when you compare them to the nonsmoking general population. This can explain perhaps why many of our patients feel short of breath to this day.

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/07/1350234