Health problems abound months after Katrina roared ashore

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Posted on Tue, Nov. 29, 2005

Health problems abound months after Katrina roared ashore

By Seth Borenstein and

Knight Ridder Newspapers

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/13285938.htm

BILOXI, Miss. - Three months after Hurricane Katrina raked the Gulf

Coast, a major health crisis is emerging as residents struggle with

the fouled air, moldy houses and the numbing stress the killer storm

left behind.

Across Mississippi and Louisiana, people are afflicted with coughs,

infections, rashes and broken limbs and they are jittery, tired,

depressed and prone to bizarre outbursts, health professionals said.

Burning storm debris, increased diesel exhaust, runaway mold and

fumes from glue and plywood in new trailers are irritating people's

lungs and nasal passages. Weary residents trying to clean up and

repair their homes are falling off roofs and cutting themselves with

chainsaws. And stress is fracturing the psyches of countless storm

victims.

" It's a cumulative effect here, " said Gilbert, a New Orleans

surgical technician who works in a Louisiana occupational medical

practice and volunteered at the New Waveland Clinic, a tent shelter

complex that just closed in Mississippi. " You get a little cough.

You get a nose that runs. You get eye irritation. Then you get

falls. And you've got the stress. It's not just little things. It's

how they all add up. "

Consider Colin Landis of Biloxi. First, he lost his rented home when

it filled with six feet of water as part of Katrina's storm surge.

Then, his marriage of 16 years, already under stress, collapsed. His

wife fled the coast with their three children. He felt alone and

strained with only $3,500 in federal help.

Landis ended up living in a borrowed RV on a friend's yard less than

a mile from a burning pile of storm debris. With the RV's air

conditioner broken, Landis slept with the window open. He'd wake up

with a raw throat and irritated eyes.

" It was almost like I had strep throat, " Landis said. " It was

obviously due to the environment. "

Landis, who isn't sleeping much anymore, said that stress is getting

to him more now than it did in the first few hectic weeks after

Katrina struck. And it's not just him who's under strain. His

brother-in-law just hurt his back falling through a storm-damaged

deck.

When Katrina bore down on Mississippi and Louisiana, health

officials worried about a toxic gumbo of industrial chemicals that

might flood the area and about the spread of infectious diseases.

Instead, a more subtle health problem developed, said Dr.

Frumkin, director of the National Center for Environmental Health, a

division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in

Atlanta.

" In many ways, this is the major environmental health disaster of

our lifetime, " Frumkin told Knight Ridder Newspapers. " It's a very

complicated set of risk factors people face. ... This is a huge set

of environmental health challenges. "

Frumkin listed several irritants and carcinogens emitted from

burning Katrina's flotsam and from traffic emissions, including

acrolein and formaldehyde. Those two chemicals trigger coughs and

bad congestion in the short term and are linked to cancer after

prolonged exposure. Recent measurements from Mississippi air

monitors show that spikes in the chemicals are much higher than what

federal standards allow. In October, acrolein levels measured 155

times higher than federal standards and formaldehyde levels were

seven times higher than allowed.

Frumkin also mentioned such emissions as polycyclic aromatic

hydrocarbons, which cause cancer, and deadly carbon monoxide. Mold

is nearly everywhere, and cleanup-related injuries are often

overlooked, he said.

But what hurts the Gulf Coast most - and compounds the effects of

everything else - is stress, experts said.

" Stress isn't a strong enough word. I'd call it anguish, " Frumkin

said. " The level of grief and anguish there is palpable. "

People can't sleep. They don't remember meetings or what day it is.

Vietnam veterans suffer flashbacks and nightmares, psychologists

say.

Gasparrini, a Biloxi clinical psychologist, calls it " Post-

Katrina Stress Disorder, " in which residents suffer bouts of grief,

shock, rapid mood shifts, confusion, anger, marital discord, guilt,

escape fantasies and substance abuse.

" The effects are lasting longer than I suspected, " Gasparrini

said. " I thought everything would be back to normal in three to four

weeks. Now, three months later, it looks like it'll be one to two

years - if we are lucky. There are a lot of people in pain - a lot

of people who cry every day. "

Making matters worse is that the devastation is so widespread that

people can't escape it. Unlike a tornado or the terrorist attacks on

the World Trade Center and Pentagon, the area of destruction in

Mississippi and Louisiana is so wide that residents need to drive

for miles to find a sense of normalcy.

" When you drive around Biloxi and see all those houses that have

been very badly damaged and see people living in the rubble for

weeks and weeks, it's easy to understand how traumatizing this has

been for these families, " said Irwin Redlener, director of the

National Center for Disaster Preparedness at the Columbia University

Mailman School of Public Health. Redlener has spent time since the

storm in New Orleans and Mississippi.

" Because of the prolonged nature of this disaster, it's impossible

to guess what rate of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) we will

see. It may be much higher than we would normally expect. "

After other disasters, between 7 percent and 12 percent of the

people directly affected eventually suffered PTSD symptoms, he said.

Because Katrina victims number in the hundreds of thousands - all

the people who lost homes, lost relatives or were forced into

temporary shelters - the mental toll could be huge, he said.

" Because the sheer size of the impact was so large, I think there is

a greater sense of despair and loss that people are experiencing, "

he said. " This experience of dramatic, prolonged displacement will

create a toll long into the future. "

Before Katrina hit, a Mississippi mental health telephone help line

received about 300 calls a month. After Katrina, the help line was

flooded with calls: One night, director Jennie Hillman had the line

roll over to her home; she was up much of the night fielding 27

calls.

In late September, federal money helped pay for a new mental health

help line called Project Recovery. It also has been swamped with

calls: In the last four weeks, Project Recovery has received 960

calls, while workers in the field have made contact with an

additional 800 people, Hillman said.

The Gulf Coast Mental Health Center lost nearly half its patients

during and just after the storm, yet new patients streamed in to

replace them and then some, said psychologist Steve Barrilleaux,

director of the adult outpatient program. Now nearly half of those

the center sees have Katrina-related problems.

Diane Lufreniere, a therapist at the center, developed strange

rashes on both arms.

" I was itching all the time and I just couldn't figure it out, " she

said. She went to three doctors, and they tried different medicines

to no avail. Finally, they figured it was the stress of housing

friends who were homeless. When the stress went away, so did the

rashes.

While the stress is overwhelming, the part of the body that shows

the most symptoms is the respiratory system, said directors of local

medical centers and makeshift clinics.

In just nine days, from Nov. 9 to Nov. 17, the New Waveland Clinic

saw 473 patients - 121 of them were for respiratory problems. The

second most common symptom was skin problems with 68 patients.

Dave Farragut of DeLisle, Miss., got one of the first new trailers

from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The first couple of

days, the smell from the trailer made his eyes burn. When his

girlfriend moved in a few days later, she also got sick at first.

For more than a decade, federal health officials have known about

irritating chemicals emitted from the glue and plywood of new

trailers, said professor Stan Glantz, of the University of

California at San Francisco.

Volunteer Gilbert at the Waveland clinic had mold problems of

her own in her New Orleans apartment. Nearly every structure touched

by the floodwaters has mold growing.

Mold is serious. In addition to irritating people and triggering

asthma and allergy attacks, it can cause infections and can be toxic

and cause cancer, said Sam Arbes, a scientist who specializes in

mold issues at the National Institute of Environmental Health

Sciences in North Carolina.

" It doesn't get any worse " than the mold levels Arbes said he saw in

New Orleans. Testing there by the Natural Resources Defense Council,

an environmental group, found mold levels in New Orleans nearly 13

times higher than what's considered very high levels by allergists.

Increased traffic is also creating breathing problems for vulnerable

people, Frumkin said. And diesel exhaust - increased because of ever-

present construction and debris-clearing vehicles with diesel

engines - causes cancer, he said.

With bridges and roads out, traffic in parts of the Mississippi Gulf

Coast is down to a crawl, so it can take two to three times longer

than usual to get places, increasing emissions.

For example, on Interstate 10, just west of U.S. 49 in Gulfport, the

average daily traffic has increased from about 37,000 last year to

52,000 last month, according to Trung Trinh, a planner for the

Mississippi Department of Transportation.

Skin problems are also plentiful. New Waveland Clinic director Brad

Stone told of a disabled woman who lived in her car for three months

while waiting for FEMA to come up with a handicapped accessible

trailer. The woman developed a fungal infection on her body that

was " extremely painful and dehumanizing, " Stone said.

It all comes down to environmental factors, Stone said.

Take ton of Biloxi. During Katrina she stayed in her

retirement home apartment right on the beach. Even though nearby

buildings were obliterated, she survived.

It's the aftermath that's come close to killing her.

ton, a 68-year-old woman with emphysema, got a severe lung

infection from the mold spreading in her apartment.

" I love it (in Biloxi), but my life comes first, " ton said,

gasping for air. In about a week, she's moving to Nevada,

saying: " I'm not going to sit here and mold to death. "