Posted on 12/01/2004 2:28:47 AM PST by snarks_when_bored
CT scans explain mysterious 9/11 cough
16:20 30 November 04
NewScientist.com news service
Inhaling toxic dust from the World Trade Center disaster on 11 September 2001 has damaged some rescue workers’ lungs more than years of smoking, US scientists reveal. Using an unconventional chest scan for the circumstances, researchers were able to capture visual signs of the severe respiratory problems that doctors could not otherwise have diagnosed.
Hundreds of people have been tested and treated for respiratory problems - or “World Trade Center cough” - since New York City’s twin towers fell, most of them suffering from asthma-like breathing difficulties. Some people, however, maintained persistent but unidentifiable coughs that could not be picked up using standard chest computed tomography (CT) scans.
“These people had symptoms that just didn’t fit the typical pattern. They weren’t treated at first because there wasn’t any objective evidence of what was wrong,” says lead author David Mendelson at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, US.
So Mendelson’s team turned to a technique called end-expiratory CT. In a normal chest scan, patients are asked to take a deep breath and hold it. In end-expiratory scans, patients take in a deep breath and release it slowly. In a healthy individual, the entire chest should be seen on the scan as an even grey colour – the CT representation of moving air.
The doctors scanned 29 rescue and recovery workers with unexplained symptoms. In 25 of these they saw splotchy black patches deep down in the finer, branching tubes of their airways. Black spots mean that air is trapped and stagnating in the lungs, making it difficult for the patients to breathe freely.
Pulverised cement
In order to gauge the severity of the air-trapping pattern, the authors developed a visual scale that ranged from 0 to 24. Mendelson says that smokers would probably fall somewhere between 0 to 4 on his scale. The World Trade Center rescue workers, however, averaged 10.55.
The extent of air trapping was found to reflect the amount of time each worker was exposed to the dust and debris of the buildings’ collapse.
The most likely culprit behind this type of airway disease is pulverised alkaline cement, says Mendelson, who presented his findings at the Radiological Society of North America’s meeting in Chicago on Tuesday. All of the subjects are now being treated with anti-inflammatory drugs.
Richard Russell, of the British Thoracic Society in London, UK, is not surprised by the degree of lung tissue damage caused by exposure to the fine cement dust, which is capable of penetrating deeply into the lungs and damaging the delicate tissues found there.
But he warns that the rescue workers’ breathing problems might be permanent: “This is a physical problem that’s not going to go away with simple anti-inflammatories,” he says. “We’ll just have to watch and see if the patients get better over time and make sure they’re not smoking.”
Anna Gosline
It makes sense that breathing large volumes of very fine dust would cause lung problems. This makes a good case for better personal air filters.
Actually I see this as setting up major lawsuits against cement companies, the bricklayers, the ships that transported the cement, the truckers that hauled it, the guys that mixed it, the crane operators that brought the cement up the building, the engineers that designed the buildings with the cement, the city for okaying it.....
Ping
Burning computers and electronics are way worse and toxic than cement.
I work as an industrial electrician. When we have a motor fry or a drive burn it smell awfull. Burning electrical insulation is one of the worst smells around.
G-d forbid a 9-11 type catastrophe could happen again -- but if it does perhaps ad-hoc air cleasning techniques could be applied -- like using the forest-fire fighting planes to drop water from 1-2 thousand feet. Or setting up spray snorkels on the tops of buildings in the path of the plume.
I can think of two worse -- burning flesh and the crushed sacs of a skunk's innards. But burning insulation and paint can by toxic -- in that way it's worse.
If those items are anything like pantyhose (synthetic made of oil products), one pair of pantyhose on fire puts off enough cyanide to kill at least 8 adults in an average room.
When I went into a house that had a fire in it without protection (SCBA, etc.) to make sure one of my friends could get out of the house, both she and I inhaled too much of the toxic fumes from a burning speciality chair-like pillow that was on fire and we were downstairs while the fire was upstairs.
Now we both have quite a time with asthma.
I have also smelled burning flesh. I used to work for an incinerator manufacturer. Dead skunks are pretty common, too. However, burning insulation has a way of invading your sense of smell for hours.
Everything is made of plastic/oil these days. Burning Poly-Vinyl Chlordes (PVC's) are especially deadly. When mixed with water and heat they generate chlorine gas. Nothing rips apart alveoli faster than a lungful of chlorine gas. I tend to be very careful around fires at work.
I just remember that the smell of burning flesh stuck in my nose for weeks. Yueeach.
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