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ON A CLEAR spring day, 150 feet above the East River, ironworker Michael Shepherd, a muscular 26-year-old with a hard hat that says "the Champ," is boasting about his two Golden Glove boxing wins and his daredevil nature.
"I wish we were working on top of the bridge today. The more danger the better," he says.
Shepherd has come to the right place. Atop the 84-year-old Manhattan Bridge, where construction workers have started massive rehabilitation of the corroding structure, danger lurks nearly everywhere. A worker could be run over by cars or subway trains that cross the bridge, be hit by a heavy falling object, like the steel beam that caught one worker in the ribs recently or "go in the hole," as ironworkers say, and fall to his death. But there is another, more insidious, danger that Shepherd doesn't find romantic: lead poisoning.
Every time Shepherd uses the pneumatic drill called the "helldog" to "bust" old rivets, or he grinds or scrapes off old lead paint, he stirs up a cloud of lead-laden dust. When he burns steel with an acetylene torch, the heat turns the lead into a dangerous fume.
"Protection for workers who have done this kind of work has been almost nonexistent on many job sites. Many workers have been horribly exposed for years and years," said Dr. Stephen Levin, medical director of the Mount Sinai-I.J. Selikoff Occupational Clinical Center in Manhattan, which has treated over 200 cases of lead poisoning in construction workers in the past five years and is now studying ways to better protect workers on the Manhattan Bridge.
Long-term exposure to lead can cause kidney disease, hypertension, stroke, nerve damage and mental impairment; it also affects sex drive and can lower a man's sperm count. And since most construction workers typically don't have a place to change their clothes or wash up after working, they often track lead dust into their cars and homes, poisoning their spouses and children.
Often the symptoms of chronic exposure are subtle and flu-like - achy joints, fatigue, sleeplessness - and deceive physicians not trained in occupational medicine. Sometimes, badly poisoned workers have been taken to the hospital with symptoms that so closely mimic appendicitis, they've had needless surgery.
Accurate numbers...