3/6/07 - March Maddness.

Again it has been a while since I've posted anything. And, again it is not for want of anything going on. Lots has been happening, mainly in and around the sick 9/11 community. As far as my health and breathing goes, the weather will warm for a day and then the temp will plummet and the winds pick up. I'm not sure if it is that my perspective has changed, due to the difficulty breathing, or this has just been a winter that started out mild and then turned vicious. I have reached a point where I have my routine pretty down pat, make sure I take my meds on time and make sure that I have my portable nebulizer with me at all times with multiple charged batteries. At times this can prove to be embarrassing; as this small, vibrating, hissing machine is sure to draw attention - but I may be moving past the embarrassment, because I've taken to 'toasting' the onlookers with my nebulizer. So while I wait for the weather to turn warmer (and enjoy the few weeks that I may have before it turns hot and humid), the things that have been progressing as far as the charity goes have been both encouraging and discouraging.

The encouraging part is that due to all the discouraging parts, we have begun planning a benefit concert that will take place in Queens College in July of this year. One of the people who works with our charity was approached by a man who promotes and organizes doo-wop and oldies concerts. We have put together a formidable line-up that combined with a great cause, should raise a lot of money for the 9/11 workers that are progressively getting sicker and sicker. Please see our main website for details and spread the word! http://www.artists4hope.org/.

The discouraging part is that not only have more and more people become sick, but that in that last very public case of NYPD Officer Borja, that I have mentioned before; the news and general public has come across some information that they have strung together and arrived at not only absurd but dangerous conclusions. As for the increasing number of ill people, well, that is self explanatory - however, this Officer Borja development I would like to name and address.

The World is Indeed Flat

For most of us, we grew up with the story of Christopher Columbus being this great explorer that discovered not only the "New World", but set out to disprove the prevailing theory that the world was flat. By sailing over the horizon and not 'falling off', he put this fallacy to rest in grand fashion! This is the story most of us have heard at on time or another usually in some early year of school, however - it happens to completely false.

In 1492, they were quite well aware that the world was round, as this astonishing discovery had been made only a few thousand years before by the ancient Greeks. So where did this come from? Well in 1828, the premiere writer of the day, Washington Irving (yes the Sleepy Hollow guy) decided to publish a 4 Volume mix of facts and fiction entitled "The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus". Why this nugget of fiction was inserted, I can only guess to 'spice up' the circumstances of Columbus's troubles getting funding and his sailing under the Spanish flag; however, this idea caught on like no one could imagine and somewhere along the line became accepted fact to the degree that they teach this to school children.

Now, I'm sure if your reading this you have begun to think that either (a) my medications are interacting horribly with each other, or (b) I have become psychotic since my last post. (For those of you who 'saw this coming' - good for you) But I beg your patience for a short time longer before I tie this all together.

As I have mentioned, the latest of 9/11 first responders to pass away was NYPD Officer Borja. He died under tragic circumstances, after his retirement and his family became quite high profile, especially his eldest son, who was at the State if the Union Address when his dad died. Since then, he has used the media platform he was given to be very outspoken about the plight and needs of the thousands of other sick people. A synopsis of his dad's story was that he responded to the trade center, had worked on the pile and become ill and died.

On 13 February 2007, however, The New York Times, published an article titled; Weeks After a Death, Twists in Some 9/11 Details. In this article, certain facts of the exact nature of Officer Borja's time at Ground Zero were unveiled. Some of the more interesting quotes from this article are:

"It turns out, though, that very few of the most dramatic aspects of Officer Borja’s powerful story appear to be fully accurate. Government records and detailed interviews with Officer Borja’s family indicate that he did not rush to the disaster site, and that he did not work a formal shift there until late December 2001, after substantial parts of the site had been cleared and the fire in the remaining pile had been declared out."

"Officer Borja worked traffic and security posts on the streets around the site, according to his own memo book, and there is no record of his working 16 hours in a shift. He worked a total of 17 days, according to his records, and did not work as a volunteer there."

"doctors may find that Officer Borja, who spent much of his police career at a tow pound in Queens, had other, pre-existing problems. His family says that he smoked a pack of cigarettes a day for years before giving it up around the mid-1990s."

"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."

At a quick glance this may seem like first rate journalism, the NYT exposing this family for milking our 9/11 driven sympathies - shame, shame, shame. However, with a great deal of precision, Officer Borja's exact illness was given a total of 3 lines, while the rest of his 'misinformation' filled 4 pages. And it is exactly in these 3 lines that the key to the world flattening out again is contained. For such a 'little understood illness' it seems the Times wasted little time in the very next paragraph 'suggesting' that Offficer Borja's condition could have come from working at the Queens auto impound or smoking. However, before we discuss the disease itself I would first like to congratulate the Times for two masterful words in their glossing over of pulmonary fibrosis; first the hint that this may be genetic is wonderful, however the rest of the article is devoid of any mention of Officer Borja's parents, aunts/unlces, grandparents or anyone in his family for that matter that has had pulmonary fibrosis - perhaps someone at the Times should look the definition of 'genetic' up before writing about it. But the single line I admire the Time for using most is that the variety of factors (genetics included) can conceivably cause this disease. Bravo! Amazing word choices; one a casual suggestion with no evidence to support it and the other could be viewed as the 'possibility' that absolutely anything could happen for absolutely any particular reason at all. However, begging the Times' pardon, I would like to focus on some science that has some fact to back it up.

Fortunately science does know some things about pulmonary fibrosis the first of which is that this disease is mainly caused by foreign particles that are inhaled and embedded into the lung tissue, these particles are usually of the composition that the body cannot metabolize or dissolve them, and as a defense mechanism - will scar the area over. This 'scarred area' or area of fibrosis, now is not as functional as the 'normal lung tissue' - with the most notable difference being that it is not as elastic as it should be. This elasticity of the lungs is one of the primary mechanisms for exhalation. The second thing that is being shown, is that there have been other people involved in the whole WTC and Ground Zero experience that are getting pulmonary fibrosis as a result of this exposure. The most notable of these people perhaps was another NYPD employee, and his name was James Zagdroga - the detective who spent most of his time in the Staten Island landfill searching through the dust for remains and clues.

So while the NYT is trying to string together pieces of this story and come to the aforementioned absurd conclusions, this is not the part of all this that I consider to be dangerous. What makes this story, for me analogous to Irving's novel about Columbus - is that the public has now latched onto their insinuations like Velcro. And just like Columbus setting sail to prove something that has been known for a thousand years, Officer Borja did not get sick from the dust and debris of the WTC and instead should be regarded as a liar. This, my friends, is dangerous. These are the notions that stop progress towards finding a solution to the problem that so many are experiencing right now. But the reality of it, is that this story the way the NYT has now reported it, is important and should scare the shit out of all of us.

From the original reporting of this story; what I read was of another first responder/ground zero worker who was on the pile and is now deathly ill. There seemed to be nothing different about it that what I already knew, when the WTC collapsed it was the largest single toxin release in US history. But in reading the NYT story with the additions (or according to them - the subtractions), this story has taken on a new dimension. The fact that a man can get pulmonary fibrosis and die while being a few blocks away from the site and after the fires had been extinguished, is horrifying.

To get to this feeling of horror, lets go over what we do know about this whole scenario. The WTC collapsed sending a plume of smoke and debris into the air covering much of lower Manhattan and parts of downtown Brooklyn. This plume is documented as having covered that distance for a period of 3 months by satellite imaging. The analysis of smoke and dust debris turned up 81 different elements and chemical compounds, some of which were considered harmless, most however are known human carcinogens. As a matter of fact there have been reports that some of the air quality monitors recorded higher levels of toxins in late December and early January, which they attribute to the machinery being able to work more effectively after the fires were extinguished, thus contributing to the added diesel fumes. (BTW - for the reader, everything here is documented in peer reviewed scientific journals) We know that this toxic dust was not only widespread, but took a while to remove effectively - as a matter of fact we know that to this day (5 years, 5 months and 22 days later) that the Deutsche Bank building (130 Liberty Street) is so badly contaminated that it needs to be taken down.

So looking at what we know, and even reading what the Times printed, we arrive at a man who spent several days (17), several blocks away from a 17 acre, 6 story pile of toxic rubble and contracted a disease characterized by inhalation of foreign particles into his lungs which caused his death. If we are to believe that the world is flat, then we have nothing to worry about - because this man didn't get sick there. If we are to think for ourselves, we see the beginning of what is to be a horrific chapter in our city's history - the one called, "Even with everything we knew about medicine in 2007, we did nothing to help thousands of sick people".

Now many may be wondering why I have waited a few weeks before addressing this article, but the answer is two-fold and simple. First when this first appeared, the people that I work with in the charity dismissed it because it was so easy to see the absolute holes in the NYT conclusions. So I was content to let it pass without comment, even other publications in the city came out in condemnation of the Times seemingly callous comments. But the story didn't go away - leading me to my second reason, which is that ever since then - almost every person I have spoken to about the problems we face as a community has posed the question (in one form or another) to me, "what about that cop that died?", for which my reply remains the same, "what about him?" and they counter with, "well he lied! He didn't get sick from ground zero, don't you find that disturbing?" And the answer is: Indeed I do, I find the ability of writers to publish something and have the public buy it wholesale without thinking to be very disturbing.

I know that I have written and taken you to many places in this post, but I regard this as a major symptom of the overall disease that is plaguing us right now, as I have stated - once the public sees the exact scope of the problem is when you will see them demand that something be done about it. However, these articles impeded that from happening. To you the reader, I will tell you the same thing I have told all the other people who have questioned me about this incident - whatever you do, don't believe what I have just said at face value. That would be a mistake - because if that is the case then the next person who approaches you with a seemingly logical convincing argument will sway your opinion again. We live in marvelous time, we live in an age where information once reserved for the 'learned' is at the touch of a keyboard or the click of a mouse. What I hope you take from reading this is the curiosity needed to fuel your own research. And as a point of advice, don't limit your quest to the average Google-ing, because this is not an average problem. Search the peer-reviews scientific databases such as http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed PubMed, the site run by the National Library of Medicine and National Institutes of Health. There are numerous papers that have been written and published since this disaster in 2001. The fact is that the information we need to see what is happening has already been written. From there, I can only pray that what you discover prompts you to ask questions of those charged with our health and safety what they are going to do about all of this - then, as knowledgeable adults and only then will they have to seriously come up with some viable solutions.