Force Feeding (bis)

One direct result of the surfeit of bulk sentimentality and the concomitant paucity of thought that surrounded the immediate aftermath of the Twin Towers attack was the failure to consider the environmental dangers to the rescue and clean-up workers. Such was the panic and urgency to get New York’s economy and especially its financial markets back up and running that the unpardonable Christine Todd Whitman at the EPA notoriously declared the area safe, based on a reading of the residue in her morning teacup. Saint Rudy never uttered a doubting word about it, either. So the ground workers were left to slog through the asbestos dust and mystery chemical particulates on their own.

Mount Sinai hospital, which has strong historical ties to labor unions, was the place the workers went if they fell ill, which of course they began to do in large numbers in the following months. But apparently no one at those acres of federal health institutes in the Maryland suburbs full of handsomely paid expert epidemiologists thought to study the phenomenon.

The failure to launch that study immediately was a huge error—let’s be generous and assume it was due to stupidity rather than venality. Anyone who’s been around formal medical research knows how damnably complicated it is and how much goes into preparing and monitoring a research protocol to keep the data clean and accurate. According to a Times article last week about the Mount Sinai doctors’ efforts, when they finally got federal money, they were told to use it strictly for clinical treatment, not research.

Mount Sinai tried to keep records on the patients anyway, and the Times article describes the shortcomings of their data-collection methods and therefore the solidity of their conclusions. No doubt long technical articles in the research journals will follow, and we will have a decade’s debate about it.

I predict that the inferior quality of the data will also be used against the victims to block their access to compensation. Like the rush to war in Iraq without vehicle armor to protect the troops, it’s one more indication of how much the patriotic screed that filled the thought-waves in those first weeks and months was focused on anything except the well-being of the people who actually comprise the nation.