Posted by
Shogrensus on Monday, April 30, 2007 1:31:23 AM
April 27 (cont.)
The View takes on the health issues facing the First Responders who ran to help at Ground Zero following the terrorist attacks on September 11. Estimates are that up to half of those people who served are now facing life threatening illnesses as a result of exposure to toxins at the site of the devastation.
The View featured two first responders, Bonnie Giebfried and Vito Valenti, who now have chronic lung disease and other ailments.
Like other first responders, neither of them received equipment to protect them from the chemicals in the air: no masks or gloves.
Rosie immediately tries to lay the blame at the feet of a Bushie:
***
Rosie: At that time had Christie Whitman said that it was safe? Had it been declared safe down there? Because shortly after 9/11, the air was considered safe. Is that true, Dr. Moline?
Dr. Moline: That’s what was said a few days later. When they were down there it was too early and the air certainly wasn’t safe. It wasn’t safe for many, many months down at Ground Zero
Joy: We should say that this is Dr. Jacqueline Moline and she is the director of the WTC treatment program at Mount Sinai
Rosie: So you’ve been monitoring the first response workers who were down there who now have these respiratory diseases. Over half the people who were down there are now suffering the way these two people are?
Moline: We’ve seen it in countless, in thousands of people from the New York area and the responders throughout the whole country who came in and have now gone back to their communities. This is a national problem. People are sick. They have upper respiratory problems. They have cough, asthma, Reactive Airway Disease. People have scarring in their lungs and serious diseases requiring lung transplants like Vito is going to require.
***
So, lucky for Whitman she isn’t personally responsible for causing the illnesses of these two particular people. The health of the other tens of thousands of people: that may be a different story.
I remember watching the images of the people running through the smoke and the dust and talking to people about how awful it would be to be breathing in the chemicals, ash and soot. As the parent of three children with tracheotomies, I am aware of the difficulty of dealing with chronic lung disease and therefore sensitive to the risks of breathing in toxins.
In the immediate aftermath of the attack, nobody was thinking about where they could find masks; people were just trying to get in to try to save anyone who may have been trapped. This crisis was so shocking, people didn’t have a plan. Backward looking assessments always seem to make perfect sense.
The crew then discussed the belief that about half of the 50,000 first responders are sick from their exposures to toxins.
***
Moline: We used to know who had been at the World Trade Center cause we would hear them coughing.
Joy: When we come back we want to talk about the federal funding because that is really the tragedy here also
Rosie: We need federal funding for this and it is coming up soon in the Senate and no matter what you feel about this government, we need to take care of these people who went down there to help us as those buildings were attacked.
Joy: They volunteered.
***
First, I am curious how the cough of a person from the WTC attack sounds so drastically different than the cough of another person with asthma or reactive airway disease. This seemed like an odd statement.
This exchange also provoked the following question: What does a person’s feeling about this particular government have to do with the first responders in New York? Is Rosie suggesting some on the left might try to punish these first responders because they were connected to the Bush “regime”? Wow!