DANA DiFILIPPO
Courtesy Philadelphia Daily News
Ed McCall once crawled beneath a subway, squishing through body parts, to confirm a suicidal man's death. He splashed in a creek running red with blood to treat a suicidal bridge jumper. And he helped birth a breech baby in a crowded, slum apartment with no working faucets to wash away the natal gore.
As a Philadelphia firefighter and emergency medical technician for 13 years, McCall has been bathed in blood more times than he can count.
So when he was diagnosed in 1998 with hepatitis C, a potentially fatal, blood-borne disease that attacks the liver, he knew he had contracted it on the job.
But his city-provided health insurer wasn't so sure. Like more than 150 other city firefighters who have tested positive for the disease in the past year, McCall was denied coverage for the costly medicine and treatment his ailment required.
That's why McCall will join thousands of firefighters who plan to rally during this summer's Republican National Convention.
City firefighters will gather for breakfast Aug. 3 and then march at noon from the International Association of Firefighters Local 22 union hall at 5th and Willow streets to the Liberty Bell on Market Street to raise awareness about hepatitis C.
More than 400 fire departments from as far away as Florida and Massachusetts and members of the American Liver Foundation are expected to join them.
Marchers plan to call on lawmakers to enact legislation declaring the disease a job-related illness for emergency workers and its treatment, an employer's responsibility. Cities also should be required to test all new recruits and current employees for the disease.
They aim, too, to convince convention planners to allow city firefighter Norm Stabinski, a 22-year veteran who has hepatitis C, to address delegates.
They hope to garner the same compassion and attention AIDS earned when an HIV-positive mother of two addressed delegates at the Republican National Convention in Houston in 1992.
"I like helping people - that's why I do this. And you know when you become a firefighter that you could die in a fire. But I never bargained on catching diseases, on the long, slow dying of hepatitis C," McCall said.
Steve Hess, a city firefighter for 18 years who is helping to organize the rally, agreed.
"Firefighters are public servants who knew, when they joined the department, they'd be dealing with sick people and dangerous situations," Hess said.
"But we had no idea any of this could happen. Even with the precautions we take nowadays, we work in such an uncontrolled environment that infection still happens. There needs to be more education."
Of all the protests planned during the five-day GOP convention, this might be the one that hits closest to home.
At least 150 of the city's 2,500 firefighters and paramedics have hepatitis C - and only half of the force has been tested, Hess said. That's a rate more than three times the national average. At least three city firefighters have died of the disease.
Mayor Street has promised $3 million to fund infected firefighters' treatment.
Mary Kohler, 37, pays more than $300 a month out of pocket to cover her medication.
A city paramedic for 10 years, Kohler learned in February that she had hepatitis C after months of misdiagnosis. She's been on sick leave since early May because the crippling medication has left her bed-bound, nauseous and depressed.
"We're hoping to educate the politicians and the general public as to our plight as public servants who have only contracted this disease through our duty to respond to the public," said Kohler, who plans to attend the Aug. 3 rally.
"I have no other risk factors for getting this disease, yet the city blames us for being sick. It's very frustrating."
Hepatitis C often is called "the silent epidemic." Most of the 4 million Americans who have the incurable virus aren't aware of it because they don't have acute symptoms.
People who have injected drugs, had blood transfusions or unsafe sex and had tattoos or body piercings with unclean equipment are at risk. So are health-care workers, many of whom encounter blood daily.
Experts suspect many emergency workers may have unknowingly caught the virus, which wasn't isolated until 1989, through contact with contaminated blood during rescues and medical calls.
"On the TV news, all you see is a wrecked car, but when we get there, we see a blender. There's blood everywhere," said Stabinski, who doctors determined was infected about 15 years ago. "I don't care if you're wearing a NASA suit, you're still going to get blood on you."
news & reports
