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City Questions 9/11 Workers Claims of Illness

June 25, 2008

The first detailed review of the medical records of nearly 10,000 ground zero workers who are suing New York City and its contractors suggests that many are not as sick as their lawyers have claimed, attorneys for the city say.

The city’s review, based on medical records submitted in federal court by the workers and their lawyers, found that as many as 30 percent of the workers reported nothing more than common symptoms like runny nose or cough. Their records, according to the review, did not indicate that doctors had ever diagnosed a specific disease.

In fact, more than 300 workers admitted in court documents that they were not ill at all.

Lawyers for the city, who conducted the review in response to a court order to sort out the seriousness of the claims, also found that many records were contradictory or incomplete, making it difficult to determine when an ailment began or how long it persisted. The documents included few records before Sept. 11, 2001.

The city, which faces a huge financial liability in the lawsuit, has ample reason to play down the claims of firefighters, police officers, construction workers and others who say they became ill because they were not given proper breathing equipment during the nine-month rescue and recovery operation at ground zero.

The workers’ lawyers have sharply criticized the city’s review, calling it skewed and largely inaccurate. They have consistently claimed — but have never released a detailed analysis of the claim — that the workers suffer from a broad range of medical problems, mostly respiratory or gastrointestinal sicknesses, but also more serious conditions like cancer, chronic pulmonary disease and sarcoidosis, a lung-scarring disease.

The city’s findings have no immediate impact on the litigation because the court is not ready to rule on the severity of illnesses or make connections between diseases and exposure to ground zero dust. But the review is important despite its obvious limitations. Until now there has been no attempt to categorize the extent of illnesses in these workers, assumed to be the most badly injured of about 40,000 or more who labored at the World Trade Center site.

And the conflict over the review findings is a preview of how difficult it could be to prove that trade center dust — a complex mix of materials created by the collapse of the twin towers — sickened workers.

Much is riding on the result. Hundreds of workers who could not return to jobs after 9/11 have had their lives interrupted until the litigation is settled. The city and its contractors could be forced to pay $1 billion or more in compensation if they are found to have been negligent in not ensuring that the workers received breathing masks and wore them.

The judge hearing the individual cases, Alvin K. Hellerstein of United States District Court in Manhattan, has criticized the workers’ lawyers for not providing complete medical records back to 1995. He has given them until the end of this month to produce thousands of missing documents so that both sides can come up with a system, known as a severity chart, to classify injuries by type and seriousness.

“Getting those records is imperative in order for us to get a real understanding of the medical conditions of this population,” James E. Tyrell Jr., a lawyer with the firm Patton Boggs whom the city has hired to lead its defense, said in an interview.

To help prepare the severity chart, the city’s lawyers did their statistical review based on the records they had: nine-page documents, called short-form complaints, that were prepared for each of the 9,618 workers by their lawyers.

That review, Mr. Tyrell said, shows that while many workers may be genuinely sick, it appears that many others are not. “A relatively high percentage of the plaintiffs either acknowledge that they are not sick, or refer to medical conditions that are common to the general population, with no indication that those conditions were caused by 9/11,” he said.

Source: NY Times Read the complete article here

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Written by NY Politics · Filed Under Health 

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