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New CPR advice: chest compressions only Heart Association hopes simpler guidelines save lives Monday, March 31, 2008 4:00 PM By Suzanne Hoholik THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH Hands-only CPR When you see an adult collapse: * 1. Call 9-1-1. * 2. Start hard, fast compressions at the center of the chest. Trade off with someone if you get tired. If no one else is around, continue compressions until paramedics arrive. In an effort to get more bystanders to perform CPR, the American Heart Association issued new guidelines today changing the way it teaches the lifesaving technique by eliminating mouth-to-mouth breaths. When an...

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) - Capt. Clint Roberts makes his living cutting accident victims out of hideously mangled vehicles, but even he could hardly believe it when two people in a 2007 midsize car survived a head-on crash with a full- sized pickup last year. The Ford Fusion's reinforced steel construction probably saved the lives of the 18-year-old driver and his 16-year-old passenger. But Roberts said it gave his Hillsborough County Fire Rescue crew fits as they tried to free them last November. Because hydraulic cutters couldn't shear the roof posts, rescue workers had to turn to heavy-duty electric saws, replacing...

Emergency Responders At Risk. hybrids may also hold a hidden danger if they are involved in a serious accident... a risk of electrocution. "If you don't know what you're doing you can be hurt seriously, if not killed by the voltage," said hybrid-certified mechanic Kevin Klein."There's 330 volts of electricity running through the lines," ... It only takes 50 to 100 volts to kill a person. "My coworkers know when I set these up, nobody's allowed in here but me," said Klein as he set up orange cones around his work area. "We have to wear face protection in case...

New York (AP) -- Nearly 300 workers who want to sue the city for illnesses or injuries suffered at ground zero will have their claims heard in federal court, a state appeals panel has ruled. The Appellate Division decision Thursday reversed a lower court ruling that had allowed the workers' bids for litigation to proceed. The requests were filed by people who worked at the World Trade Center site after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The appeals court said federal law gave the U.S. District Court in Manhattan jurisdiction over all claims for loss of property, personal injury, or death...

Politicians and labor leaders held a rally at Ground Zero Saturday pledging to support efforts to get federal funding for first responders, construction workers, volunteers, residents, and students exposed to health risks during and after the 9/11 attacks. On the sixth anniversary of that day, three New York Congressman––Democrats Carolyn Maloney and Jerrold Nadler, and Republican Vito Fossella––will introduce the 9/11 Health and Compensation Act. The bill would provide healthcare and monitoring to all the people exposed to the environment of downtown Manhattan after the attacks. It will also require the federal government to fund data collection so that the...

Much of what is known about the health problems of ground zero workers comes from a small clinic in Manhattan that at the time of the trade center collapse had only six full-time doctors and a tiny budget. Yet in the weeks after 9/11, its doctors stepped into the fray in the absence of any meaningful effort by the city, state or federal government to survey, interview or offer treatment to potentially sickened recovery and cleanup workers. Since then, the clinic, the Irving J. Selikoff Center for Occupational and Environmental Medicine, based at Mount Sinai Medical Center, has examined more...

September 3, 2007 By Mark Mix - After years of scheming, waiting, and investing forced dues into the campaigns of their handpicked politicians, Big Labor bosses believe they are just one step away from a big payoff. Their goal is simple: Ram the Police and Firefighter Monopoly Bargaining Bill (H.R. 980) into law by any means necessary. Just before the August recess, under suspension of the rules, union-label politicians succeeded in passing the Police and Firefighter Monopoly Bargaining Bill through the House. Thanks to the union bosses' propaganda machine, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ran into little difficulty. Misguided congressmen from...

Retiree Gene O'Brien hurried to the World Trade Center site after Sept. 11, 2001, as a volunteer helping to shuttle supplies to police and fire workers. Some days, his only ID to get into the disaster site was a tattoo on his forearm. "A couple times I showed them my Marine tattoo, and they said go ahead," recalled O'Brien, adding that he and other volunteers also came up with their own makeshift identification cards. "We didn't forge anything, we just made them up with our own pictures and at one point we copied a UPC code off a Pepsi can...

NEW YORK - As Rudy Giuliani campaigns around the country highlighting his stewardship of New York City after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, he is widely hailed for bringing order to a traumatized city. But he has also raised the hackles of rescue and recovery workers by likening his experience to theirs. On at least three occasions, in responding to accusations that city officials failed to adequately protect the health of workers in the wreckage, he has boasted that he faced comparable risks himself. In one appearance he declared that he had been in the ruins "as often (as), if...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Republican presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani said Friday that he misspoke when he said he spent as much time, if not more, at ground zero exposed to the same health risks as workers combing the site after the Sept. 11 attacks. "I think I could have said it better," he told nationally syndicated radio host Mike Gallagher. "You know, what I was saying was, 'I'm there with you.'" The former New York mayor struck a nerve with firefighters and police officers when he said Thursday in Cincinnati that he was at ground zero "as often, if not more,...

Rudy Giuliani drew outrage and indignation from Sept. 11 first-responders yesterday by saying he spent as much time - or more - exposed to the site's dangers as workers who dug through the debris for the missing and the dead. Speaking to reporters at a Cincinnati Reds ballgame he caught between fund-raisers, the GOP front-runner said he helped 9/11 families and defended himself against critics of how he managed the attack's aftermath. "This is not a mayor or a governor or a President who's sitting in an ivory tower," Giuliani said. "I was at Ground Zero as often, if not...

THE terrorists who attempted to bomb central London last week deliberately placed the second vehicle to catch rescuers attending the injured from the first explosion, Scotland on Sunday can reveal. The senior security source also said the primitive gas and petrol devices were most likely the work of determined terrorists struggling - because of the security crackdown - to get their hands on the ingredients needed to create high explosives. Yesterday, a huge police manhunt was under way for the terrorists responsible as forensic experts continued to examine the vehicles involved for clues. The attack was thwarted after fumes were...

Paramedics have told how they saved the lives of scores of people after spotting one of the car bombs in central London. A Mercedes packed with petrol, gas and nails was found abandoned outside Tiger, Tiger nightclub in Haymarket in the early hours of Friday morning. A two-man ambulance crew, one aged 27 and the other 37, alerted police after smelling gas coming from the vehicle. The 37-year-old, who was not named, said: "As we pulled up outside Tiger Tiger, we came to a stop behind a Mercedes car, which was parked rather badly, about three feet from the kerb....

Excerpt - April 15, 2007 -- Filmmaker Michael Moore's production company took ailing Ground Zero responders to Cuba in a stunt aimed at showing that the U.S. health-care system is inferior to Fidel Castro's socialized medicine, according to several sources with knowledge of the trip. The trip was to be filmed as part of the controversial director's latest documentary, "Sicko," an attack on American drug companies and HMOs that Moore hopes to debut at the Cannes Film Festival next month. Two years in the making, the flick also takes aim at the medical care being provided to people who worked...

COLLEGE STATION, Texas -- The acrid, awful, haunting smell of charred flesh still returns sometimes, without warning. They're phantom smells, five years old, but that doesn't make them any less real to Mark Dodge. Same with the nightmares, which are less frequent now but no less jarring. "Certain nightmares will always probably be there," Dodge said. When you have been where Mark Dodge has been, seen what he has seen, smelled what he has smelled, you don't forget. When you have bagged incinerated bodies and carried them to a morgue truck, the experience lingers. When you have spent days raking...

"As I sat and watched the horror unfold on 9/11, I could smell the acrid smoke drifting south from the Pentagon. There was a never ending line of cars heading away from Washington. With the rest of the world I watched the towers come down and among the victims were 343 New York firemen. I'll never be able to look at a fireman or woman again without knowing that he or she would lay down their lives for me without ever knowing my name. We can never thank them enough." The first plane hit the other tower Right after I...

The largest health study yet of the thousands of workers who labored at ground zero shows that the impact of the rescue and recovery effort on their health has been more widespread and persistent than previously thought, and is likely to linger far into the future. The study, released yesterday by doctors at Mount Sinai Medical Center, is expected to erase any lingering doubts about the connection between dust from the trade center and numerous diseases that the workers have reported suffering. It is also expected to increase pressure on the federal government to provide health care for sick workers...

(CBS) NEW YORK Nearly seven out of every 10 World Trade Center rescuers suffered lung problems during or after their work at Ground Zero, and high rates of lung "abnormalities" continued years after the 2001 terrorist attacks, according to a new health study. Days before the fifth anniversary of the destruction of the 110-story towers, Mount Sinai Medical Center on Tuesday issued the results of the largest study on 9/11-related health effects. The study focused mostly on the so-called "World Trade Center cough," a phenomenon that was little understood immediately after the attacks, but has become the chief concern of...

by Mark Finkelstein August 10, 2006 - 22:01 Hat tip to poster 'nutmeg' at Free Republic. Brian Williams of NBC Nightly News might have meant to praise the heroism and selflessness of our various service people. But he employed what was at best an incredibly awkward, at worst an inappropriate, offensive and simply wrong manner of doing it. On this evening's 7 PM ET edition of Hardball, Chris Matthews mused about the UK-born terrorists whose plot was foiled today: "Here we have maybe 24 people who have lived in London and England and the free world for all these years...

If your heart suddenly stopped, how long should rescue workers try to save you? Should you be taken to the hospital even if you can't be revived and are likely to die? Canadian researchers say they've devised a test that helps rescue workers spot those futile cases and save a frantic trip to the hospital. Some paramedics with advanced training — those who can give drugs and start IVs — already are allowed to stop giving CPR if their efforts fail and they have consulted a doctor, said lead researcher, Dr. Laurie J. Morrison of the University of Toronto. But...