9/11 First Responders: 'We're Dead Men Walking'

[133724]

(CBS) NEW YORK More than five years after the 9/11 terror attacks, the full impact of that day is still unknown. First responders who rushed into the collapsing buildings are dealing with health issues they believe could be just the tip of the iceberg.

<snip>

Today, seven out of every 10 suffer from respiratory disease.

And that's just the beginning.

"My wife to this day is still pulling pieces of glass out of my back," John Feal said. "I have nose bleeds on a regular basis, ringing of the ears, can't sleep."

CBS 2 spoke to just six of the 33,000 people who are now being treated after working at ground zero. As time goes by, new health problems emerge, some unexplained.

http://wcbstv.com/seenon/local_story_047002528.html

[Erika]

1. But Rudy and W said all was fine

You mean you can't trust a Republican?

[Name removed]

2. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[liberaldemocrat7]

9. Considering Bush provoked the 9-11 attacks this does not surprise me

that the Bush administration lied about the polluted air near the site of the tower collapse.

Bush and Christie Todd Whitman should go on trial for endangering lives of Firefighters and Police officers in New York City as well as those people who cleaned up the towers area for months.

If Bush had not strongarmed the Taliban for oil and gas pipelines through Afghanistan under threat of invasion 9-11 probably would not have happened.

Who threatens to invade a country because they refuse to allow you to build gas and oil pipelines in their own country?

[rman]

3. kick

[tblue37]

4. If the Republics nominate Giuliani, this should follow him wherever he goes. (eom)

[file83]

5. As soon as Bush was done using them as a props in his photo op...

...he forgot about them. Same with the soldiers. Same with Katrina victims.

Bush, not such a good guy.

[Bluebear]

6. "Vito Valente is going to die. Mike McCormack is going to die."

"We will unfortunately outnumber those people who died on 9/11," one of the responders said. "Vito Valente is going to die. Mike McCormack is going to die."

[stillcool]

7. 9/11 officer dies, son attends 'Union'

9/11 officer dies, son attends 'Union'
By DEVLIN BARRETT, Associated Press Writer
11 minutes ago
WASHINGTON - A former New York policeman died Tuesday night as his 21-year-old son prepared to appear at the State of the Union speech to symbolize the desperate health problems of some Sept. 11 workers.
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Cesar Borja, 52, had been in intensive care, breathing through a tube, at Mount Sinai Medical Center, awaiting a lung transplant.

His son, college student Ceasar Borja Jr., was invited by Sen.Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., to attend
President Bush's speech as a reminder of workers who were stricken with a host of illnesses after exposure to toxic World Trade Center debris.

The younger Borja learned of his father's death in a phone call while eating dinner around 6:30 p.m. EST. He still planned to attend the speech, which was scheduled to begin 2 1/2 hours later.http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070124/ap_on_go_pr_wh/stat...

[adigal]

8. That police officer had not been down at the site

as claimed. There was a big article debunking his story. He did not go down there for months, if I recall, and the paper did not even ask him for proof.

He may have had a problem with something in the air months later, but it seems unlikely. Either he had a misunderstanding with his family, or he misled them.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/13/nyregion/13health.html?ex=1172120400&en=621ca4997871f3a5&ei=5070

[stillcool]

10. so what?

does that mean that any New Yorker who wasn't at the Ground Zero site on 9/11, but happened to be living and breathing in and around the neighborhood should just suck it up and die? Should the government officials who declared the air 'safe' be held accountable only for those deaths that can be proven to have been 'on the pile'? Who is it that you believe did the misleading?

Weeks After a Death, Twists in Some 9/11 Details
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/13/nyregion/13health.html?ex=1172120400&en=621ca4997871f3a5&ei=5070
Mrs. Borja said she still believed her husband was sickened in his work around the site. Shown his father’s memo book, Ceasar Borja, who had become something of a spokesman for ailing 9/11 workers, said it was the first time he understood what his father had actually done. “They kept saying my dad’s a first responder,” he said of the newspaper accounts. “I honestly never knew if he was a first responder.” Asked why he had not corrected the seemingly erroneous or unconfirmed public accounts, he said, “The reason I never tried to correct that impression is I never knew the truth of whether my father was there or not. It was always a mystery for me. I never thought of correcting them because I honestly believed it myself.”

It is hard to determine precisely how the apparent misinformation about Mr. Borja’s work at ground zero came to be reflected in newspapers, as well as in television and radio broadcasts. The family says it was not the source of the claims about working on the smoking pile. A spokeswoman for The Daily News insisted the paper had never explicitly said Officer Borja had rushed there soon after Sept. 11, only that at some point he had rushed there. Despite a number of articles and editorials that referred to him working amid the rubble and within a cloud of glass and concrete, she said the paper never actually reported his arriving there before December.

The spokeswoman, Jennifer Mauer, continued to maintain that Officer Borja had worked “200 hours on the pile.”
Other newspaper accounts repeated the account of Officer Borja’s work on the rubble without attributing it to anyone.
Mrs. Borja and her son said that The New York Times was the first newspaper to ask them for documents showing Officer Borja’s actual duties at ground zero.

Doctors and coroners may yet draw a connection between Officer Borja’s death and his more limited duties around ground zero. A city autopsy is under way. Experts say his illness, diagnosed as pulmonary fibrosis, is a rare and little-understood disease, which, depending on a variety of factors — genetics, for instance — can conceivably be caused by modest exposure to certain toxic substances or pollutants.

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An Emotional Fight

Officer Borja’s death came amid an unfolding and emotional fight over the health of ground zero workers and the role of city, state and federal officials in caring for those who might have been sickened by their work in and around the site. A federal lawsuit has been filed on behalf of hundreds of workers, whose lawyers say they are sick and in some cases dying because of their exposure to dangerous pollutants. That suit charges that the city and federal government failed to protect them from exposure. (The Borjas said they had no plans to sue.)