A recent round of cuts at the Department of Human Health and Services may have decimated research into the dangers of firefighting.
Mark Olalde wrote about this recently for Pro Publica and joined The Show to discuss.
Full conversation
SAM DINGMAN: Good morning, Mark.
MARK OLALDE: Good morning. Thanks for having me.
DINGMAN: So let's start off high level here. This recent round of cuts eliminated two-thirds of the staff at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Tell us what that is.
OLALDE: So NIOSH is an agency within the CDC, which is within Health and Human Services, and really their mandate is to research in ways that protect worker health around the country. I wrote about firefighters, but it really applies to just about everyone. If you ever used an N95 mask during the COVID pandemic, they were the ones that tested it to make sure that it was truly an N95 mask.
DINGMAN: OK. Well, I want to get to the firefighters in just a second, but I have to ask you, in your piece, you quote an employee of NIOSH saying that in the wake of these layoffs, it was pure chaos. What did that look like?
OLALDE: About two-third of the staff kicked out the door on April 1. No one really knew it was coming. There was a vague email sent to the unions the night before, saying layoffs are coming and be prepared. It was so quick that lab animals in a West Virginia lab had to be euthanized. Facility staff at a Pittsburgh lab were let go, and there's an experimental mine underneath that lab that is now at risk of flooding because you don't have people manning it, so it truly happened quickly and without organization.
DINGMAN: Well, let's come to the firefighter piece of this now. There is within NIOASH a program called the Firefighter Fatality and Investigation Program. What is that?
OLALDE: So that's an eight-member team that any time there's a line of duty death in the firefighting world, so a house is on fire, a firefighter comes to pull the family out, and they unfortunately perish.
The fire department can ask this team at NIOASH to do an investigation to figure out exactly what happened, what went wrong, and then the report goes to the family first, so the family gets some closure saying OK, we know what happened. We know what the events were, and then that report gets published for the entire fighting firefighting community to say change your SOPs, do this differently. Let's make sure this doesn't happen again, and really it's kind of the team's role to put together that research.
DINGMAN: This makes me think of another very memorable quote from the piece that the goal of this program was, among other things, I believe somebody put it as learning through tragedy.
OLALDE: Exactly that is a phrase they repeat learning from tragedy. They really don't want any death, any injury, any accident to be in a silo to have happened in vain. They really do want it, want to learn from it and kind of protect the full firefighting community.
DINGMAN: So this program, it wasn't just about investigating individual incidents. They were also doing broader research into health trends amongst firefighters who, as you write, seemed to be predisposed towards a variety of cancers. Tell us about that exactly.
OLALDE: There's something called the National Firefighter Registry for cancer, which had already enrolled just in the last year or so 23,800 firefighters, volunteer firefighters, wildland firefighters, you know, residential, military to give their life experience in terms of their health.
A lot of them had cancer and the goal was to ultimately enroll 200,000 current and retired firefighters to essentially create the world's largest study into firefighter cancer to figure out what types of cancer come from on the job exposures, what exposures led to that. And, and what sort of SOPs, what sort of gear, what sort of respirators should we be using to avoid these types of cancers?
DINGMAN: And just some kind of remarkable statistics on this. According to one study at the University of Cincinnati, rates for Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and multiple myeloma are 50% higher amongst firefighters. Rates for testicular cancer are 100% higher than the general population. These are very stunning numbers.
Do we have any sense from the research that the project was able to do so far? What accounts for that?
OLALDE: So the great tragedy of the program is it was really only being stood up recently.
It was only opened about a year ago for enrollment of firefighters and so the it was, it's, kind of become dead in the water, frankly, and they were just pushing to get to this 200,000 number where they would have this trove of data that is truly unprecedented.
And so there is research recently that is pointing to things like the turnout gear, so the kind of yellow jackets and pants that firefighters throw on before going to a fire. They have incredibly high levels of PFAS, so it's known as forever chemicals that can lead to all sorts of cancer. You know, wildland firefighters often don't wear respirators when they're in the middle of these giant wildland fires and they're breathing in smoke. And so there's a lot of exposure pathways but really linking which does what and how do we address it to protect firefighters that was unfortunately early stages.
DINGMAN: And there was also early stage research into the particular danger for female firefighters, right?
OLALDE: Exactly. You know, females don't make up a major percentage of the firefighting force, but what that also means is that their workplace exposures are specific to women have not been well studied and so only in the past few years has there been a growing knowledge of, you know, cervical and ovarian cancers and things like that.
And, and so part of the study and one of the researchers I spoke with, really their goal was let's figure out these female specific cancers as well and let's help this population of the firefighting world that has not had this, this level of attention before.
DINGMAN: So what does HHS say about these cuts?
OLALDE: You know, I would love to know that myself. They have my phone number and email and they're welcome to give me a call and tell me, you know, they said nothing that's congressionally mandated is going to disappear. I followed up with them and said, can you explain to me if you, if you fire all the staff that work on a congressionally mandated program, how is that not disappearing? And I'm waiting.
