MEMO:
From: eli
To: Dr. A and fellow/sister advocacy-minded docs
ahem. while i know you already know this at some level, i feel compelled to offer this small reminder: at various times in your career, you will be looking at what you know for certain to be a duck. you can tell by its obvious quacking and other striking waterfoul indicators. yet without doubt, there will be numerous people in positions of economic and political power who will vehemently deny this, asserting in the strongest terms that this is quite clearly a chicken. “Note the general clucking an other chicken-behaviors,” they will say. after months or years of effort, research, advocacy, committees, whitepapers, and no small amount of wasted taxpayer dollars, you may indeed get from them a “qualified acknowledgement of the possible existence of certain possible qualking behavior which could potentially indicate the presence of distinct quasi-duck characheristics” or some such hooey. and yet in the face of such madness you will persevere, just like those others whose science, despite the wall of denial from the EPA, is in the service of the people and not profit:
| All the while, three key elements of the catastrophe have been largely overlooked. First, that it was a disastrous air pollution event not only for lower Manhattan but also for Brooklyn, home to some 2.5 million people, at least half of whom live in areas that, like Reeve on the Brooklyn Bridge, were cloaked in debris on 9-11. Second, a bona fide new disease seems to have emerged. Dubbed “World Trade Center Cough,” it appears to be caused by a combination of pollutants not previously known to produce human disease and thus not covered by Clean Air Act standards or subject to EPA monitoring. |  |
