When the New York City medical examiner decided last week that Felicia Dunn-Jones' death was directly linked to the dust of the destroyed twin towers, making her the 2,750th victim of the attack on Sept. 11, 2001, Dunn-Jones' husband, Joseph, was relieved.
But while that decision brought some comfort to Jones, who had fought for three years to have his wife's name added to the city's official list of victims, it is likely to have an unsettling effect on thousands of other people who also came into contact with the dust on Sept. 11.
Many people who breathed in the dust were were office workers like Dunn-Jones, a 42-year-old whose office was a block from the trade center. She developed a cough weeks after fleeing the attack and died in February 2002.
Many other people working downtown that morning were also engulfed by the roiling plume of dust. Thousands of schoolchildren and people living in Lower Manhattan also breathed in the dust.
But city officials said that the medical examiner's decision to reclassify Dunn-Jones' death did not alter those people's health outlook.
Even those exposed to the dust need not be too concerned, experts say, especially if signs of respiratory problems have yet to develop.
At a news conference on Thursday, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that although the kind of exposure that Dunn-Jones experienced on Sept. 11 was not unique, the circumstances of her case were.
"Think of it as though somebody had gotten -- had a beam fall on them and it just took a little while for them to succumb to their injury," Bloomberg said.
New York City's chief medical examiner, Dr. Charles Hirsch, has attributed Dunn-Jones' death to sarcoidosis -- which produces microscopic lumps called granulomas on the lungs -- and cardiac failure. He determined that exposure to the dust had exacerbated -- though not necessarily caused -- the disease.
Studies have drawn strong connections between exposure to the dust and a range of respiratory ailments, but they suggest that after an initial spike in the number of people reporting illnesses, incidence rates have returned more or less to normal for certain diseases.
For many residents, workers and students in Lower Manhattan, the physical symptoms of dust-related ailments may be secondary to the anxiety produced by hearing about the clinical studies and the deaths of ground zero workers. The reclassification of Dunn-Jones' death is likely to increase that anxiety.
Drug lord Jose Adolfo Macias Villamar, alias “Fito,” was Ecuador’s most-wanted fugitive before his arrest on Wednesday, more than a year after he escaped prison from where he commanded the country’s leading criminal gang. The former taxi driver turned crime boss became the prime target of law enforcement early last year after escaping from a prison in the southwestern port of Guayaquil. Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa’s government released “wanted” posters with images of his face and offered US$1 million for information leading to his capture. In a country plagued by crime, members of Fito’s gang, Los Choneros, have responded with violence, using car
The team behind the long-awaited Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile yesterday published their first images, revealing breathtaking views of star-forming regions as well as distant galaxies. More than two decades in the making, the giant US-funded telescope sits perched at the summit of Cerro Pachon in central Chile, where dark skies and dry air provide ideal conditions for observing the cosmos. One of the debut images is a composite of 678 exposures taken over just seven hours, capturing the Trifid Nebula and the Lagoon Nebula — both several thousand light-years from Earth — glowing in vivid pinks against orange-red backdrops. The new image
CYBERCRIME, TRAFFICKING: A ‘pattern of state failures’ allowed the billion-dollar industry to flourish, including failures to investigate human rights abuses, it said Human rights group Amnesty International yesterday accused Cambodia’s government of “deliberately ignoring” abuses by cybercrime gangs that have trafficked people from across the world, including children, into slavery at brutal scam compounds. The London-based group said in a report that it had identified 53 scam centers and dozens more suspected sites across the country, including in the Southeast Asian nation’s capital, Phnom Penh. The prison-like compounds were ringed by high fences with razor wire, guarded by armed men and staffed by trafficking victims forced to defraud people across the globe, with those inside subjected to punishments including shocks from electric batons, confinement
Canada and the EU on Monday signed a defense and security pact as the transatlantic partners seek to better confront Russia, with worries over Washington’s reliability under US President Donald Trump. The deal was announced after a summit in Brussels between Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa. “While NATO remains the cornerstone of our collective defense, this partnership will allow us to strengthen our preparedness ... to invest more and to invest smarter,” Costa told a news conference. “It opens new opportunities for companies on both sides of the
RSS