The numbers they refer to (even after the correction) were only those hundreds of firefighters who are now officially being forced onto disability retirement. More than a couple of thousand of firefighters are under medical treatment. (See various articles in the NYT in Nov. and Dec.) And (little known fact) numerically most of the rescue workers in the first week were thousands of civilian volunteers - (a truly amazing cross section who sociologically and politically had nothing to do with the phony group literally bused in and then out to chant "USA" for Bush's appearance - when you see the clip this week notice that except for the one retired fireman next to Bush NONE of those in the group chanting have the telltale white powder that coated the rest of us in the first few seconds of work. Their clothes are totally clean. After the photo-op they left the site, as a group, and we were allowed back to work having lost several precious hours).
[Disclosure: I happen to be one of the volunteer rescue workers and am still taking the inhaled steroids, etc. But the situation is really quite real.]
It is very sad that this has been covered up. Even the City's Fire Dept. PR people put out the periodic press releases only Friday evening to bury them and use odd ways of calculating the numbers of their own (like dropping out those firefighters already forcibly retired). There was money passed by Congress to create a permanant registry and monitor the fate of the rescue workers - it was vetoed by Bush in the last $5 billion Bill (and not cited among the items he wished to see re-sent to him).
Paul A.
At 09:22 PM 9/9/02 -0400, you wrote:
>Cian wrote:
>
>>http://uk.news.yahoo.com/020909/80/d98ih.html
>>
>>Not surprising in itself, though it will be interesting to see what the
>>official reaction to this will be.
>
>The original of that was the CDC link for MMWR, one of the world's
>great publications, I posted a little while ago.
>
>Doug