According to workers at Quickmed Urgent Care, an urgent care clinic in Columbiana, Ohio, “they are seeing more and more people from East Palestine complaining that they don’t feel well.”
Patients report a burning sensation when breathing, skin rashes and general weakness, some even complain that they feel better when they leave their homes and that it gets worse once they return, they said.
They may even have chemical bronchitis, usually caused by prolonged exposure to hazardous fumes, acids or dust, they said.
For Dr. Deborah Weese, from QUICKmed, what happened will be associated with “many things, but if you leave the house and (the symptoms) improve, and when you return they reappear, I don’t think it’s an allergy or a cold… let’s be real: Yes When it comes down to it, it could be something in the future from all these chemicals that they’re breathing in that we don’t know about.”
Ohio Senators Sherrod Brown (Democrat) and JD Vance (Republican) released a joint statement on long-term health monitoring of East Palestine residents yesterday.
In a letter to the heads of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, they said that “East Palestine residents and the surrounding community deserve to know if their health has been compromised by this disaster. Now and in the years to come.”
The residents of that community, of about 4,750 inhabitants, were allowed to return to their homes days after the accident on February 3, when a train operated by the Norfolk Southern railway company left the track.
A “controlled release” of toxins into the air was then necessary to prevent an eventual catastrophic explosion, authorities claimed.
Although federal agencies called for calm and dismissed environmental risks, from the impacted area there were reports of deaths of fish, birds and other local fauna.
President Joe Biden’s administration has come under heavy criticism for its response to the serious incident.
The president was questioned for not scheduling a trip to Ohio and instead going to Ukraine, while his Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg, went to East Palestine more than two weeks after the derailment, initially silenced by the press and the government. federal.
Among the products carried by the train was vinyl chloride, a highly flammable gas considered a potent carcinogen.
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