BF: At one point, I noticed that you testified as to your physical symptoms and how this had affected your health. What did happen to you, just on a physical level?
IS: It’s an interesting question because I was in excellent physical condition for my age and gender and I was training for an 8,000m mountain climb, so aerobically I knew I could be up at 19 – 20,000 feet, no oxygen, doing a fair amount of aerobic activity… what happened to me is
—what happened to all of us basically, and it doesn’t sound very nice, but this is what happened—we had sores—some Firefighters I know still have these horrific sores all over their body, our hair fell out, eye infections, shortness of breath, Adult-onset Asthma, chronic coughs, tiredness, extreme fatigue, cardiac symptoms, heart palpitations where you never had any before, irritability, a lot of symptoms that were consistent with neurotoxic poisoning, those were just the physical symptoms, and in some cases people reported that their hair fell out and even their dental work fell out.
And to me they were consistent with signs of radiation poisoning. However, the toxic cocktail that had been burning there… I think a California group went in and analyzed and pretty much came up with the determination that there were about 900 contaminants, 200 different kinds of dioxins, we had the particulate matter the asbestos, the concrete, they had said that particles were ground so fine that they were the smallest particles ever produced in history. And they blew past all our barriers and got lodged right in our lungs and most of us who were exposed to that are suffering from something called reactive airway disease syndrome, which is something that the coalminers get.
What it means is that from that point on, you cannot be around anything much that triggers an asthma attack.
Stomach problems… anytime we were ill or not feeling right, the 9/11 health services and the Red Cross would try to get us into counseling, and to me at the end of all of this, it seemed that we experienced the same thing that the Gulf War of other civilians who were exposed to local superfund site disasters, were all told it was in our head.
That’s exactly what went on down in 9/11, the WTC is just another massive superfund site and we were told it was in our heads. So if we weren’t feeling well, if we were irritable… you had the feeling that it was just you. It wasn’t until I went to a detox program and got together with everyone else and compared symptoms we realized that this was an epidemic.
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