Toxic indifference from the White House

Toxic World Trade Center dust is linked to sarcoidosis:

Rescue workers and firefighters in New York City contracted a serious lung-scarring disease called sarcoidosis at a much higher rate after the Sept. 11 attacks than before, said a study that is the first to link the disease to exposure to toxic dust at Ground Zero.

The study, published by nine doctors including the medical officer monitoring city firefighters, Dr. David Prezant, found that firefighters and rescue workers contracted sarcoidosis in the year after Sept. 11, 2001, at a rate more than five times higher than the years before the attacks.

Unlike previous studies that have linked exposure to the toxic dust cloud that enveloped lower Manhattan after the World Trade Center's collapse to many different respiratory illnesses, this study zeroes in on one disease.

Sarcoidosis, which can be life-threatening, causes an inflammation in the lungs that deposits tiny cells in the organs, leaving scar tissues that damage them. Several rescue workers and others exposed to WTC dust have claimed they contracted the disease from their work at Ground Zero.

Just remember:

NEW YORK -- In the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center, the White House instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to give the public misleading information, telling New Yorkers it was safe to breathe when reliable information on air quality was not available.

That finding is included in a report released Friday by the Office of the Inspector General of the EPA. It noted that some of the agency's news releases in the weeks after the attack were softened before being released to the public: Reassuring information was added, while cautionary information was deleted.

"When the EPA made a September 18 announcement that the air was 'safe' to breathe, it did not have sufficient data and analyses to make such a blanket statement," the report says. "Furthermore, the White House Council on Environmental Quality influenced . . . the information that EPA communicated to the public through its early press releases when it convinced EPA to add reassuring statements and delete cautionary ones."

How many times must we be shown the Bush administration is indifferent to US citizens? ... Hell, indifferent to humanity?