According to a recently published study, firefighters in three major municipal fire departments were more likely to be diagnosed with lung cancer and leukemia than the general population.
Researchers examined the firefighting exposure and medical histories of 20,000 firefighters with over 1,300 cancer-related deaths and 2,600 cancer incidence cases in Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco who were on duty between the years 1950 and 2009. This was one of the largest studies of its kind, and was the first to relate the time elapsed during fire runs to cancer risk.
Among eight types of cancers examined, they found slight, but statistically significant positive exposure–responses for lung cancer and leukemia risk. The researchers wrote:
These findings contribute to the evidence of a causal association between firefighting exposures and cancer.
The study did not address the health effects on wildland firefighters who, unlike structural firefighters, do not have access to an effective breathing apparatus to provide them clean air to inhale into their lungs. There could also be significant differences between the harmful effects of vegetation smoke and that produced by materials in structure fires.
Some wildland firefighters, especially those on hand crews, are routinely exposed to smoke-filled air for hours each day when assigned to a large fire, sometimes for 14 days. At other times they can be stationed in a smoky environment 24 hours a day for weeks at a time when inversions trap smoke. This frequently occurs in northwestern California, for example on the Six Rivers, Klamath, and Shasta-Trinity National Forests. In those cases even non-firefighters working in administrative positions at the Incident Base have been adversely affected by breathing contaminated air.
There needs to be a concerted effort to conduct a similar study on wildland firefighters. It should be led by a physician/epidemiologist and should evaluate the long term health and occurrence of cancer and other diseases among wildland firefighters. There is a lot of grant money out there and it should be possible to get some of it pointed towards this overlooked niche of firefighting.
Remember the huge battles to get the bill passed to provide health care for the firefighters that were suffering from medical issues after working in the debris from the towers that fell during the 9/11 attacks? Most of us felt a huge relief when the “S. 1334: James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act of 2009“ was finally passed. We wrote about it several times, with the latest being HERE.
It turns out that the bill, or at least the way the provisions are being interpreted, does not cover the treatment of cancer for the firefighters that worked on the debris pile. Cancer — you would think this would be close to the number one condition covered for the people that worked in that toxic environment.
John Howard, the World Trade Center Health Program administrator, said in a statement that cancer would not be covered because there is not adequate “published scientific and medical findings” that a causal link exists between September 11 exposures and the occurrence of cancer in responders and survivors. So if we wait, and study the link for another, what, 20 or 30 years we can prove it then?
This is a disgrace.
Jon Stewart of the Daily Show, in a piece named “I Thought We Already Took Care of This S@#t”, expresses his opinion on the issue. The clip has profanity, but it is bleeped out.
NorthJersey.com has more details about this development.
Meanwhile, the Canadian government has a vastly different approach. For years the provinces of Alberta and Manitoba have had presumptive coverage for a list of conditions for firefighters. If they are diagnosed with one of the cancers on the list, it is considered an occupational disease and they may be eligible for workers compensation benefits. In fact, Alberta expanded their list in May to include prostate, breast, skin and multiple myeloma, bringing the total to 14 types covered under the Workers Compensation Board. Their government acknowledges that firefighters are at a greater risk of contracting cancer than the general public, and it can be difficult or impossible to prove that a particular case of cancer was caused by a specific incident or exposure, on or off the job.
The Joint Fire Science Program (JFSP) has released their plan for wildland fire smoke research. The 58-page document outlines their priorities for funding smoke research through 2015.
Much of the emphasis appears to be directed at how to deal with the public’s perception and tolerance of smoke. Smoke is becoming an increasingly sensitive subject to the population due to larger wildfires burning for longer periods of time, concern about the effects of wildfire smoke on global warming, and prescribed fires continuing to be an important tool for land managers.
One aspect of wildfire smoke that Wildfire Today has written about frequently is the short and long term effects of smoke on the health of firefighters. On April 23, 2010 we covered the study that NIOSH and the U.S. Fire Administration are conducting about cancer among structural firefighters. We called out the land management agencies and the firefighting associations:
There needs to be a concerted effort to conduct a similar study on wildland firefighters. It should be led by a physician/epidemiologist and should evaluate the long term health and occurrence of cancer and other diseases among wildland firefighters. There is a lot of grant money out there and it should be possible to get some of it pointed towards this overlooked niche of firefighting.
The JFSP five-year plan does mention research on the effects of smoke on wildland firefighters, but at times it seems like an afterthought. For example, the objective for one of four research themes, “Smoke and Populations”, sometimes includes the “impact of smoke on populations” (page 26), and in other places it is described as “impact of smoke on populations and fire fighters” (page 21).
However, the plan does list some specific “Smoke Science Foci” that may benefit firefighters:
2011: (SSP T3 -2): Epidemiological research/literature review to determine human health risk from high PM loadings.
2011 (SSP T3-4): Fire fighter smoke health hazards: trends in health and exposure.
2012 (SSP T3-5): Review of epidemiological research to determine human health risk from high PM, high ozone and high aromatic hydrocarbon loadings with a focus on synergisms between pollutants.
We hope that the “foci” turns into actual research.
I ran across a news article about Senator Joesph Lieberman (I-CT) accepting the nomination to serve as one of the seven or eight Co-Chairs of the Congressional Fire Services Caucus, a nonpartisan group of more than 320 members of congress which:
…unites Republicans and Democrats in support of fire service legislation that benefits all first responders.
Rep. Peter King
In perusing the Caucus’s web site, which is run by the Congressional Fire Services Institute, it turns out that Rep. Peter King (R-NY) is the Chairman of the Caucus. His name rings a bell as the off-camera Representative to which Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) was directing his anger in the video we posted on July 30, 2010. (Here is a link to another video about that encounter.)
The heated rhetoric between the two members of congress concerned a procedural delay introduced by Rep. King which initially prevented the passage in the House of the 9/11 First Responder Health Care Bill, officially known in the Senate as “S. 1334: James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act of 2009“. Rep. King sought to delay the passage of the bill while Rep. Weiner angrily recommended passage. The bill would provide health care costs for 9/11 rescue workers, sickened after exposure to the toxic smoke and debris. Finally, the House passed the bill in September.
Recently, however, Rep. King has come out strongly in favor of the 9/11 First Responder Health Care Bill. In fact, he is one of the few Republicans to openly support it, and on December 7, 2010 wrote a letter to his Republican colleagues asking for their votes in the Senate.
There is still a chance that the bill will receive an up or down vote in the Senate before the session ends this year. Votes have been prevented previously by a Republican filibuster. If it is not passed by the Senate this year, the slate will be wiped clean and it will have to be re-introduced in both the House and the Senate next year.
But you can help get the bill passed. CALL YOUR SENATORS!Here is a list of their phone numbers.
If you are still undecided about helping firefighters, check out Jon Stewart’s position on the issue of health care for 9/11 first responders.
This bill is gathering more attention thanks to Jon Stewart. It appears that there are enough votes now in the Senate to pass a slightly revised version. BUT. There is one Senator that says he will hold it and prevent its passage. That esteemed individual is Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK).
In an interview on Fox News Coburn said two of his reasons for killing the bill are:
1. The bill has not been through a committee yet and there have been no hearings.
WRONG. A committee that Coburn is on held hearings on the bill, but Coburn chose not to attend.
2. Coburn said: “This is a bill that has been drawn up and forced through Congress at the end of the year on a basis to solve a problem that we didn’t have time to solve and we didn’t get done.”
WRONG. The bill was introduced in the Senate June 24, 2009, and was passed by the House on September 29, 2010, but has not been voted on in the Senate.
It is incredible that an idiot like this can single-handedly prevent our 9/11 first responders, some of whom are dying from exposure to toxic shit at the 9/11 site, to receive the health care they need.
Even if the Senate does pass this bill over the insane objections of Senator Dufuss Coburn, the House will still need to vote on the revised version, since it has been changed after they passed it in September.
More information:
Even Fox New’s Shep Smith took on Senator Coburn today for his stance on this bill. See the 37-second video HERE.
Shep Smith called many Senators who refused to talk with him about the bill. “We called a lot of Republicans today who are in office at the moment,” he said Monday afternoon. “These are the ones who told us ‘no’: Senators Alexander, Barrasso, Cornyn, Crapo, DeMint, Enzi, Grassley, Kyl, McConnell, Sessions, Baucus, Gregg, and Inhofe. No response from Bunning, Coburn, Ensign, Graham, Hatch, and McCain.”
And we wrote more about it on December 17, 2010. That post has two videos in which Jon Stewart takes on the issue.
Call your two Senators (list of phone numbers) especially if one or both of them are Republicans, most of whom plan to vote against the bill.
Call Senator Tom Coburn’s office at (202) 224-5754.
A few hours after we wrote our second article about this issue on December 17, if you searched Google for “9/11 First Responder Health Care Bill”, that Wildfire Today article was the fifth one listed on the first page. Now there has been so much publicity about the issue that Wildfire Today does not show up in the first five pages of Google results.
This is the sixth time we have used the tag “idiot” for an article since January, 2008.
We generally don’t stoop low enough here at Wildfire Today to write about politics, but there is one issue that anyone who cares about firefighters should not ignore – the 9/11 First Responder Health Care Bill, officially known in the Senate as “S. 1334: James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act of 2009“. It was introduced in the Senate June 24, 2009, passed by the House on September 29, 2010, but has not been voted on in the Senate. According to a CNN story, it is being filibustered by Republicans.
We first wrote about this bill on July 30, 2010 when Republicans in the House were fighting to kill the bill. In that article we included an amazing video showing Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) ripping into another Representative who intended to use certain procedures to prevent a vote on the bill. Two months later it passed the House, with a vote of 268 to 160.
The bill is named after a deceased New York Police Department detective who died after having worked at the 9/11 ground zero site in the toxic atmosphere. It seeks to provide medical coverage for the hundreds or thousands of firefighters, police, and other responders who worked at the 9/11 sites and were breathing the air that EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman said on September 13, 2001 was “not of concern”. Her statement contradicted scientists’ data from the previous day, and other facts that came to light later.
The mainstream media has virtually ignored this issue for the last several months. Recently Jon Stewart of the Daily Show has taken up the cause in a big way. On Thursday December 16 he said this:
Call minority leader Senator Mitch McConnell, (202) 224-2541. He has played a major role in preventing this bill from being voted on in the Senate.
One more video
One more Jon Stewart video about the 9/11 First Responder bill is below. It is from Monday, December 13. He starts talking about the bill at about the 2:00 minute mark.
Before we published the article on April 23 about the study that NIOSH is conducting on a possible link between structural firefighters and the occurrence of cancer, as part of our research we emailed Michelle Ryerson, the chair of the National Wildfire Coordinating Group’s Risk Management committee, formerly called the Safety and Health Working Team. We asked if the NWCG was aware of any similar studies that involved wildland firefighters. We also explained to her that we had talked with Travis Kubale, the NIOSH study’s primary project officer, who at the end of the conversation became interested in perhaps doing a cancer study on wildland firefighters. We passed along Mr. Kubale’s contact information to Ms. Ryerson, as well as others in the NWCG.
Today we received a response from Ms. Ryerson, which she called “an update from the NWCG Risk Management Committee perspective”:
NWCG was never approached by NIOSH to be included in this study.
The NWCG is coordinating with US Fire Administration on potential of including wildland fire to the NIOSH study.
NWCG has an active Smoke Exposure Task Group (SETG) under the auspices of RMC who’s focus is smoke hazard identification and mitigation for wildland firefighters and support personnel in fire camp environments (SETG website should be up and working by end of May).
The SETG began smoke exposure monitoring in 2009 and will continue monitoring in 2010 so that we can better understand the levels of smoke exposure both in fire camp and fireline operations.
The SETG is also preparing a long-term project proposal abstract to seek study sponsorship from universities, NIOSH, and other scientifical organizations.
Also worth mentioning is the fact that the DOI, FS, and many state agencies have instituted wildland firefighter medical standards programs that help track firefighter health issues throughout their arduous duty fire career.
We replied to Ms. Ryerson and the others that she had cc’d with her response:
I can imagine that employers of wildland firefighters may not be enthusiastic about opening a can of worms that may link cancer with exposure to smoke on wildland fires, but the Right Thing To Do is to look at this issue and either prove or disprove a link. I hope the NWCG will not only continue to collect data about the fire environment, but will also pursue a possible cancer link with just as much enthusiasm.
