Toxic air at Ground Zero appears to have claimed two more victims. Amazingly, one of these victims is a former 47-year-old federal inspector who monitored health and safety at after 9/11 who lost a 2-year battle with colon cancer.The other victim was an Arabic-speaking detective who had worked on major Middle East terrorism cases for over two decades. He died of cancer at 58.
Both of these men who never met were convinced that their illnesses were caused by exposure to toxins in lower Manhattan after 9/11.
In the case of the detective, the New York City Employee Retirement System agreed and ruled his cancer as being caused by on-the-job exposure and awarded him an accident disability pension. On the other hand, the healthy and safety inpector died while still locked in a fight to overturn the federal government's denial of his workers' compensation application.
Most medical experts are understandably skeptical that cancer could show up so quickly in someone exposed to minimal amounts of 9/11 dust. Cancer, after all, is a disease that normally has a latency period of 15 to 20 years. Both men said they started suffering respiratory problems immediately after spending time at or near Ground Zero.
In the days after 9/11, the detective who lived in downtown Manhattan, worked around the clock out of the district attorney's office a few blocks from Ground Zero, feverishly studying phone taps and tracking possible Al Qaeda cells. In an interview last year, he recalled the terrible dust cloud that hit him one night as he drove through the Battery Place underpass of the FDR Drive. He tried to catch his breath and went about his job.
It became harder and harder to swallow. I went to the doctor, and he told me I had a tumor in my esophagus. When they checked, it had spread to my liver, lung and spine.
As for the health and safety inspector, he arrived in Manhattan in late November 2001 from OSHA's Denver office. He volunteered to help local OSHA staff monitor air quality among rescue and recovery workers at Ground Zero. He was there only for a week, but as soon as he returned home to Colorado he started having respiratory problems. He noticed his lymph nodes were swollen and he began suffering from oral and skin lesions and terrible abdominal pains, so he immediately filed a workers' compensation claim.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2007/07/19/2007-07-19_shocking_victims_of_911-1.html
