Still More Zadroga

You may have heard that the The James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act of 2009 was voted down the other day. I still take no position on whether the air quality at Ground Zero has contributed significantly to health problems of the workers on the pile. I'll leave that to the epidemiologists. We'll know one way or another whether this is another "Gulf War Syndrome" or not.

But the odd thing is that the Democrats insisted on keeping Zadroga's name associated with the bill. I hadn't looked him up in awhile, but here's a very good article on his death at that well-known neocon site, the New Yorker.

The type of material found in Zadroga’s lungs was also significant. Talc and cellulose are widely used pharmaceutical ingredients, Hirsch noted, but neither was considered a major respiratory hazard at Ground Zero: talc because it wasn’t found in the air in abundance; cellulose because it is not considered particularly hazardous. (The molecules are too large to pass through the elaborate filtering apparatus of the upper airway.) The absence of needle marks Hirsch deemed insignificant, because clean needles cause less scarring.

And:

The truth of this is hard to gauge. Four months after meeting with Joe, I wrote to the Zadrogas’ lawyer, who agreed to fax me a copy of the results of James’s 2003 biopsy, the one that Joe had said showed extensive lung damage. The document that arrived was eight pages long: a comprehensive report on the various tests and their findings. But its import was unequivocal. The lungs had only minor abnormalities and showed no evidence of talc or cellulose. When I contacted a pathologist unconnected with the case to ask whether this could have been an oversight, he scoffed, explaining that, under the polarized light that labs use to spot foreign particulate matter, such particles shine out like stars in the night sky. Had the material Breton found in Zadroga’s lungs in 2006 been there in 2003, it would have lit up the lab.

Note as well that Zadroga's wife, who did not work on the pile, died suddenly. The cause is not known, but this is very suggestive:

In Florida, however, events took a strange turn. About a year after the move, Ronda died, suddenly, at the age of twenty-nine. The news came as a surprise to Joe. “We didn’t even know she was sick!” he told me. When I asked what could have killed Ronda so abruptly, Joe suggested that it was stress—the burden of looking after a young child and an invalid husband. “It was just too much for her,” he said. Reached by phone, Ronda’s mother would not talk about her daughter’s death. A family friend, however, said that the actual cause was blood poisoning, brought on by intravenous drug use, adding that “everybody down here knew what was going on.” A local investigation noted that, according to the Medical Examiner’s Office, Ronda’s lethal infection could not be conclusively determined to be the result of intravenous drug use. But track marks and multiple needle punctures were found on the body, and a toxicology report revealed non-toxic levels of drugs, including methadone.

Zadroga Case Updates

I wrote a week or so back about the strange case of James Zadroga, a 34-year-old police detective who died from lung ailments, and the fact that NYC's medical examiner declined to certify that he died from a Ground Zero-related cause. The medical examiner has now revealed what he believes the cause of death to have been:

A city detective who became sick after working hundreds of hours at Ground Zero got the lung disease that killed him by injecting ground-up prescription drugs, the city medical examiner said Thursday.

But Detective James Zadroga's father adamantly rejected the city's findings - and revealed that a third medical opinion backs up his belief that his son died from toxic dust he inhaled at the World Trade Center site.

"Jimmy never abused drugs," Joseph Zadroga said. "I dispute that. The medical examiner did not report any track marks on his arms or body."

But the ME counters with some pretty convincing evidence:

Borakove said Hirsch found cellulose and talc granulomas, insoluble compounds used as binders in prescription drugs, in Zadroga's blood vessels.

"The only way you are going to see that is by injecting," she said. "Because they're not soluble, the material will stay there."

Mayor Bloomberg, who had initially distanced himself from the medical examiners findings, embraced them with just a tad too much zeal:

"Our chief medical examiner believes that the deceased was using some of his drugs in a manner for recreational drugs...Nobody wanted to hear that. We wanted to have a hero. There are plenty of heroes. It's just in this case, the science says this was not a hero."

Well, it's not how you die that determines whether you're a hero, it's how you live. By all accounts Zadroga performed heroically on the pile; that's not in question.

I want Zadroga's case resolved correctly. I will admit, I'd love for the ME to be correct; not because it harms the Zadrogas or because it debunks the air quality claims, but because it would indicate that Zadroga is not the canary in the coal mine, and that we are not going to see a lot of pile workers dying young.

Update: Longtime SLC buddy TAM, who has expertise in the medical arena, checks in with this comment:

The ME is correct. Those chemicals do not pass through the resp/capillary plexus, and do not pass into the blood stream via gut absorption...they are too big. They remain in the vessels, and can cause scarring of tissues that said blood stream feeds, through ischemia secondary to blocked vessels and the immune response and subsequent inflammation as a result of the bodies reaction to these minute foreign bodies.

It is essentially proof positive that he did inject crushed pills of some sort, or some substance that would contain these chemicals. What is not clear from what I see in the OP, is the evidence to conclude that use of these crushed drugs was the CAUSE of death. The article does not make it clear either. What you have is evidence of two potential causes for the disease process that killed him. The question is which of these two causes (the insoluble drug filler components versus the inhaled fibers from GZ) eventually lead to his death...a hard thing to determine IMO...

So where we're at is that the ME says that he has conclusive evidence that Zadroga injected drugs, and TAM confirms that if the evidence is legit (which nobody has a reasonable basis for doubting as yet), then injected drugs is indicated. But we still haven't seen the conclusive link between the injected drugs and death.

As I've said consistently on this blog, the one area that I think the "Truthers" might have a point on is the air quality. I hope they're wrong, but only for the sake of the workers.

Update II: Craig in the comments points out this further discussion in the article first linked above:

Looking for a third opinion, Zadroga's family turned to Dr. Michael Baden, the New York State Police chief forensic pathologist. Baden, who had previously reviewed the case, said he agreed with the New Jersey medical examiner, finding that Zadroga's lung damage was caused by inhaling Ground Zero poisons.

"He suffered inflammation of the lungs due to inhaling particulate matter while at the World Trade Center," Baden said.

Baden said Zadroga had a type of "black lung" disease typically seen in coal miners and caused by inhaling particulate matter.

Under a microscope, "You could see glass fibers there," Baden said. "You don't get that from injecting drugs."

The question of what killed James Zadroga is an open question, and one that requires an answer.