The bill signed by President Barack Obama on January 2, 2011, that provided free medical treatment and compensation to the first responders of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack was named after the first rescuer to die from inhaling dust at ground zero, Detective James Zadroga. However, the man who the New York Times said “played a leading role in bringing attention to the medical needs of thousands” of rescue workers and getting Congress to allocate $4.3 billion to provide medical care to those responders like Zadroga, Dr. Stephen M. Levin, died from cancer on February 7, 2012. He was 70 years old.
After spending more than a decade as a general practitioner in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, he joined the Irving J. Selikoff Center for Occupational and Environmental Medicine at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in Manhattan in 1979. He was named a co-director of the center in 1987, with the Times noting that he served as many as 4,000 patients a year.
Just days after the terrorist attack, Dr. Levin and his staff began planning for a clinic that could provide comprehensive examinations for responders. A 2004 study by the clinic showed that within 48 hours of the attack, nearly 90 percent of the 10,116 firefighters and other responders reporting an acute cough. The Times noted that “was just a hint of what the workers faced,” with their exposure to trillions of microscopic shards of glass and to carcinogens like dioxin and asbestos, one of the primary causes of mesothelioma.
“I’m not saying we’ll see a huge wave of cancers in 20 years, but I know the rate won’t be zero,” Dr. Levin warned in 2003. “The point is not to count statistics, but to plug the people who need it into care and to detect the diseases as early as possible, when we still might have a shot at curing them.”
The New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health (NYCOSH) said Dr. Levin was “first and foremost an advocate for health of workers in the broadest sense. He devoted his life and extraordinary talents not only to ensuring that workers who contracted occupational diseases got the best possible treatment, but to preventing workers from being exposed to the conditions that caused the illnesses. He saw the fight for higher wages, better working conditions shorter hours, education, transportation and housing as part of the struggle for the health of the working class as a whole.”
The Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization, which put together the video above, said Levin was “an amazing scientist, caring doctor, hero to workers, and friend. Dr. Levin was a founding ADAO Science Advisory Board Member whose contributions not only to our organization, but to our communities, were truly immeasurable. A frequent ADAO conference speaker, Dr. Levin’s tireless work can be seen, heard, read and felt everywhere. As Maya Angelou said, ‘I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.’ Dr. Levin will be missed, but never forgotten.”
Our Dallas litigation lawyers express both our admiration for the impact Levin had on so many lives as well as condolences to his family. “The number of workers whose health he protected is in the tens of thousands,” Dr. Philip J. Landrigan, chairman of the department of preventive medicine at Mount Sinai, told the Times. “These include those whom he treated directly, but also those he protected through his advocacy and research findings.”
Stanley Iola, LLP – Dallas litigation attorneys
Tags: asbestos, dallas litigation lawyers, dr. stephen m. levin, mesothelioma, mount sinai school of medicine, president barack obama, september 11