Starting in early 2002, firefighters who responded to the World
Trade Center on that awful day the previous September began
reporting what became labeled “World Trade Center Cough.” Since then, numerous other
first responders, later responders involved in search and clean-up
and people who simply lived in the general WTC area have also
reported a variety of respiratory and other ills.
Clearly, these people are suffering. But the question is: Are
they suffering from a variety of toxins or alleged toxins that
filled the air after the fiery explosions, or is their problem
stress-caused psychogenic illness with perhaps some non-psychogenic
illness mixed in?
Some scientific papers have indicated stress is a major factor.
But the media have always favored the multiple toxin or “environmental illness”
theory, and now insist as a chorus that a new report from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in the
journal Environmental Health Perspectives has settled
it.
Certainly the study’s authors don’t equivocate: “Many who worked
at Ground Zero in the early days after the attacks have sustained
serious and lasting health problems as a direct result of their
exposure to the environment there,” Dennis Charney, Mount Sinai’s
dean for academic and scientific affairs, said in a statement issued with the study.
The media then dressed up these findings. For example, the
New York Times claimed pneumonia was “significantly more
common” among responders, but the report actually says responders
were merely more likely to have “sought medical help” for the
illness. It had no data on actual diagnoses.
What the report did find, and which sounds awfully persuasive,
is that 69 percent of some 9,500 responders said they suffered new
or worsened breathing problems at the time of their WTC work.
Further, in 59 percent symptoms persisted until their examinations
(conducted from 2002 to 2004).
But these are just self-reported claims. The best indication
these people have real symptoms is that, among non-smoking
responders, twice as many had abnormal readings on spirometer (a
device that accurately measures your ability to breathe) when
compared to the general population.
Case closed? Not by a long shot.
ONE GLARING PROBLEM IS that those evaluated in the Mount Sinai
study aren’t a representative sample of responders, but merely an
assessment of fewer than 10,000 from a total of about 40,000.
That is, this is not an epidemiological study. “An
epidemiological study would want a group of people who are selected
using a sampling design, where the group represents a study
population,” observes John Fairbank, co-director of the UCLA-Duke
University Medical Center National Center for Child Traumatic
Stress. “This doesn’t.”
This study looked only at the minority of responders who came to
Mount Sinai to have their health monitored. People who
“self-select” to participate in such medical studies tend to do so
because they believe they’re sick. So you can’t make any meaningful
comparisons to responders who didn’t volunteer for the study or to
the general public. This problem alone wholly invalidates the
significance Mount Sinai and the media gave the report.
But what about those spirometer readings that were compared to
those of the general population? All this device (invented 150
years ago) can do is measure, in various ways, breathing capacity.
And labored breathing is a main symptom of psychogenic illness.
That is, a spirometer and its operator have no way of
distinguishing labored breathing from psychogenic illness or non-psychogenic illness. There
are devices that are much more valuable for this and they’re
commonly found in major hospitals such as Mount Sinai — but the
Mount Sinai researchers didn’t use them.
ULTIMATELY, NOTHING IN THE Mount Sinai paper offers the least shred
of evidence that the suffering responders aren’t by and large
suffering from psychogenic illness. Commonly misinterpreted as
meaning “it’s all in your heads,” this actually means the symptoms
can be quite real and debilitating but that they originated with
stress. And 9/11 is synonymous with stress for the entire nation,
and certainly far more so for the responders.
All stress disorders are unique, but the WTC illnesses do follow
certain patterns. Denver psychologist Herman Staudenmayer, a critic
of “environmental illness,” points out one: “Typically with
mass-psychogenic illness nothing happens initially and if you don’t
have an immediate affect you shouldn’t have a long-term
effect.”
Indeed, in this case it took several months before responders
began to complain. Now some say they were afflicted at the time;
but they didn’t then. As such, it’s a direct parallel to Gulf War
Syndrome, in which no complaints were registered until long
after the war ended.
Another pattern is that suggestions that people are suffering
environmental illness can wreak havoc on huge numbers of
people.
In the Serbian province of Kosovo in 1990, for example, at least
4,000 residents suffered a mystery illness that included headache,
dizziness, hyperventilation, weakness, burning sensations, cramps,
chest pain and nausea. It began at a single high school and rapidly
spread to dozens of schools in the province. Observed researchers: “An outbreak of respiratory
infection within a single class appears to have triggered fears
that Serbs may have dispensed poison.” They hadn’t.
Rumors of Israeli-spread poison gas caused a similar mass
outbreak of illness among West Bank Palestinians
in 1983.
THAT BRINGS US TO perhaps the most distressing aspect of the WTC
outbreak.
In addition to the trauma experienced at the WTC site, the best
explanation for these ills is that they have been induced by the
media and select scientists who steadily beat the drum insisting
responders ought to be sick. The bastion of these scientists since
2002 has been — surprise! — Mount Sinai.
A co-author of this study, Dr. Philip Landrigan at Mount Sinai, is the probably the
nation’s leading proponent of environmental illness. Another
co-author, Jeanne Stellman, has been an influential (and
heavily criticized) advocacy researcher on Agent Orange and dioxin
since 1986.
Mount Sinai and the sycophantic media are no friends of those
brave men and women who rushed to the World Trade Center on 9/11 or
helped in the cleanup; they are their tormenters.
Our heroes deserve our compassion and help for their WTC-related
illnesses, whether psychogenic or not. But true compassion begins
with informing them there is no scientific evidence indicating they
should be sicker than anyone else.
