Nun who says lung disease from 9/11 attack sickened her - dies

Associated Press

AIKEN, S.C. - A nun who says her lungs were permanently damaged after spending six months at Ground Zero following the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks died Wednesday.Sister Cynthia Mahoney died at her Aiken home, according to Shellhouse Funeral Home. She was 54.

No cause of death was given, but Mahoney has said in several interviews that she thinks poisoned air where the World Trade Center towers fell gave her a deadly mix of asthma as well as pulmonary and digestive problems.

Mahoney asked results of her autopsy be used in a class action suit by Ground Zero workers who say the air around the site has sickened them.

Mahoney spent every day for six months after the attacks as a chaplain and an emergency medical technician.

"We are sick - physically and emotionally," Mahoney told The Oregonian in a 2004 story. "We cannot work because of health issues resulting from 9/11 rescue activity. We suffer from serious respiratory illnesses to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. And no one seems to realize this."

Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., said Mahoney's death should be more proof of how dangerous it was to work at Ground Zero."The death of Sister Mahoney is yet another tragic reminder that September 11 continues to take lives," Clinton said. "Her life and sacrifice embody the heroism that was so prevalent in the days and weeks after the attack."

Mahoney's funeral will be Saturday at Shellhouse Funeral Home's chapel in Aiken. A private burial will follow.

9/11 in the air

By Dan Rather - Syndicated Columnist

NEW YORK CITY — Drive across one of this city’s many bridges, wait in traffic to enter a tunnel or walk past any number of security-sensitive spots, and you are more likely than not to encounter a quiet but visible-by-design police presence. The sight of a parked squad car, lights flashing silently and constantly, has become a part of the New York scenery, especially in Manhattan. It’s one of the many post-9/11 changes — some subtle, some less so — that the slow lapse of time has transformed into the commonplace...........

And so it continues with the struggle to come to terms with the health aftershocks of Sept. 11, 2001. Thousands who were caught up in the dust cloud that accompanied the collapse of the twin towers, who worked on “the pile” in the weeks and months that followed, and who continued to live and go to jobs downtown — amid air-quality assurances that turned out to be bogus — claim to be victims of 9/11’s lingering health effects.

Their problems range from chronic to life-threatening and permanently debilitating. A pile of studies shows that those with early and prolonged exposure to ground zero’s toxic brew of dust and fumes suffer disproportionately from respiratory disease. No one seems to doubt or deny that people were hurt and even killed long after the towers fell.

A recent ruling by a federal judge means that many of those who claim to have been injured in the aftermath of 9/11 will get their day in court. But as The New York Times reported on Tuesday, the general recognition that people were genuinely harmed by the air at and around ground zero does not necessarily translate into a winning courtroom case for any given individual. If an emergency worker who put in long shifts on the fallen towers’ burning pile cannot prove with “a reasonable degree of medical certainty” that his or her specific illness is a direct result of ground zero’s dust and smoke, he or she is likely to have a hard time winning compensation from any negligent party or parties.

A lot of this has to do with the different levels of medical proof required by science, the law and politics. But regardless of the technicalities, the thought that some, perhaps many, who gave so much in that massive rescue-turned-recovery effort might be denied their full share of justice is not one that sits comfortably, nor should it be.

Sept. 11 gets invoked so often that, in some places, it might be in danger of becoming an abstraction. New York, though, has never been one of those places. Nor will it ever be, so long as so many are still hurting.

http://www.mexiadailynews.com/opinion/local_story_306102613.html?keyword=secondarystory

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