New York City. At a detox center not far from the World Trade Centre site, Duncan MacIntyre sweats away on a treadmill, trying to cleanse his body of the toxic metals inside. While the towers collapsed on Sept. 11, 2002, they sent clouds of smoke, laden with PCBs, dioxins and heavy metals into the air and lungs of the city’s rescue workers, leaving their health in ruins.

Many of those emergency personnel now go to the same facility as MacIntyre to cleanse their systems through a regime of exercise, vitamins and saunas.

But MacIntyre isn’t a firefighter, and he says he became ill after being exposed to toxic dust while working far away from the World Trade Centre, and in a very different line of work -- as a doctor at New Waterford Consolidated Hospital in Nova Scotia.

It all began with renovations in 2002, which left sections of the hospitals buried in dust. “It would cover everything – the nurses’ station, your work area, the residents’ rooms,” recalls says Joanne Gillis, who worked as a nurse on the third floor. “The dust was so bad you couldn’t leave your linen cart out in the hall. You had to put it in a resident’s room, put a sheet over it and keep the door closed.”

MacIntyre remembers coming into work early some mornings and finding his staff there already. “One of the big questions I asked was why are you here so early today? And they said, ‘Well, we have to dust down the surgery room.”

His secretary, Deanna Bray, remembers enough dust to top off your coffee cup if you didn’t keep it covered. “There would be dust floating on top of it … after five, 10 minutes,” she says.

MacIntyre and other employees at New Waterford describe minimal efforts on the part of the hospital to prevent the dust from entering work areas. “There were no barriers up, no gyprock, no doors. They had some plastic sheeting, but all the building materials they were taking out they were taking down the hall in wheelbarrows.”

At the time, no one was worried about the effects of the dust. “We knew the dust wasn’t healthy, but hindsight is 20-20,” says Gillis. “It was more of an inconvenience.”

But by May 2002, MacIntyre and others throughout the building started getting sick. “It was the long weekend in May, and I got up in the morning to go out and stack some wood at our cottage. And it was around 7:30 in the morning … and within 15 minutes, everything was just spinning. I got very weak … and that’s when it really started. I had some dizziness, vertigo, and just feeling rotten.”

Within weeks, he began to suffer from other ailments, including weakness and severe headaches. But the source of his illness was a mystery. “All the testing that I had done, primarily, was negative,” says MacIntyre. “I went to endocrinologists, neurologists, ENT specialists, I had bone scans done, I had a lot of blood tests done.”

Several others, including Bray and Gillis, noticed similar symptoms. But with no clear diagnoses, the group pressed on, trying to continue their regular work routines amid slews of doctors’ appointments and tests. By the end of 2002, MacIntyre started to become suspicious that something inside the hospital was causing the ailments, and while the hospital administration conducted some air quality testing, it didn’t turn up anything serious enough to cause the major health effects so many people were experiencing.

In April, 2003, MacIntyre and Bray decided they were too ill to continue working. “(MacIntyre) just decided, ‘That’s it, we can’t do this anymore. Whatever this is, we have to take some time off and really figure out what’s going on,’” says Bray. “So at that point in time, we decided we would finish the day out, finish up what was on our desk and leave – basically not have a plan as to when we were coming back.”

“It came to the point that it was tough on me, but it wasn’t fair to the patients,” MacIntyre says. “I was not healthy enough to be practicing. I was dizzy, I had severe headaches and I was weak. I was not up to standard to perform the procedures that I do in the run of the day.”

So with what little energy he had, MacIntyre threw himself into getting some answers. He scoured the Internet for clues into his condition, and finally found a website for the toxicology lab at the University of Western Ontario. He and Bray sent off blood samples, which came back showing mid-to-upper-range levels of metals such as arsenic and antimony.

“I said to my wife, ‘You know what? I think I’ve found the problem,’ says MacIntyre.

Armed with the knowledge that he had metals in his system, the doctor began to see a GP in Port Hawkesbury, a community two hours away from New Waterford. Because metals are absorbed by body tissue, they often don’t show up to their full extent in blood and urine samples. But Dr. Ben Boucher uses a treatment called chelation, where patients are given a chemical agent that causes metals to be bound and then excreted in the urine.

After just half a dose of the binding chemical EDTA, the lead levels in MacIntyre’s urine skyrocketed. “His level of lead went from seven to 73, I believe, so a considerable increase,” says Boucher.

In all, 11 New Waterford employees are being treated by Boucher. But with the hospital, provincial health plan, private health care plans and workers’ compensation refusing to pay for the treatment, those under Boucher’s care have had to pay the treatment bills out of their own pockets. At $160 a pop, it’s been costly.

“We’ve gotten help from nobody,” says Lynette McVicar, who was on the cleaning staff. “It’s like we’re on our own. … But it’s a health issue – we’re sick. How much do you have to prove that you’re sick? (We) can’t go to work, (we) have these toxicology reports that show (we) have all these high levels, what more do you want?”

John Malcom, the president and CEO of Cape Breton District Health Authority, says nothing in the studies he commissioned shows high levels of toxic metals in the hospital – though he admits that the hospital didn’t test for these metals either before or during the renovations, doing so only later, after people got sick. And while he doesn’t doubt that people are ill, he suggests lifestyle factors could be to blame.

“The studies that we have done to date have failed to show any relationship” between the renovations and people’s illnesses, Malcom told W-FIVE. “We have evidence that in one area we had an environmental problem – we had insufficient air exchanges. … In other studies we’ve done, we have not found any evidence of a pattern of heavy metals being present in a fashion that you could attribute to the hospital.

“You have to look at the results that people have got back from their tests that have been done for blood and urine, and what are the likely causes of any elevated results. So, for example, the relationship between cadmium and smoking … -- there’s a strong body of literature that says if you smoke you are more likely to have higher levels of cadmium. … We (also) know there’s a relationship between arsenic and shellfish.”

But MacIntyre’s doctors have concluded that his symptoms are a result of exposure to dust containing heavy metals during the renovations, and those who have become sick say there are simply too many people suffering from the same symptoms for it to be a coincidence.

“If you get a mathematician and you have a probability of one in a million, you would never find all these people with different households, different ages, male and female, eating different foods, having the same symptoms,” says MacIntyre.

“I don’t smoke, I have the occasional tuna sandwich,” says Darlene McKenzie, who worked as a nurse at New Waterford. “We all don’t have the same lifestyles, we don’t live in the same area, and our only common thread is that we worked in the hospital. Most of us have had a chance to compare our levels and there is a pattern – we do have similar metals, we have high metals, and we’ve all been sick.”

Adds Anne Ready, Duncan MacIntyre’s wife: “These people’s families aren’t sick. I know it was insinuated in the health report that came back that people need to look at their environments and their homes and things like that, but my husband’s sick and my kids and myself aren’t sick and (it’s) the same with the other people. And that’s what made us believe that the only common factor about these people is that they all work in New Waterford Hospital.”

At a public meeting organized by W-FIVE, New Waterford residents and members of Nova Scotia’s opposition parties called for an independent inquiry into what went on at the hospital.

“I think the onus is on this government right now to immediately call a public inquiry into what’s going on,” said Liberal MLA Dave Wilson to applause from residents. “A public inquiry will not make any of these people better, but a public inquiry will get to the bottom of what happened.”

With no clear answers, those who became sick say their top priority is feeling better and recovering their old lives. For these employees, the cost has been high – both financially and personally.

“My two little kids are four and six, and at times they are afraid to come near me, especially in the summer of 2003, because I was very irritable and I used to twitch a lot,” says MacIntyre. “My nine-year-old cries herself to sleep a lot.”

Others describe the feelings of inadequacy and frustration of not being able to go about their normal routines.

But although they feel the hospital has let them down, at this point, they say they aren’t looking to settle the score monetarily.

“With regard to a lawsuit against the hospital, that’s the furthest thing from my mind,” says MacIntyre.

“I want to get my health back, because if I don’t have my health, you can pay me $100 million and it doesn’t mean a row of beans to me. I can’t work and I can’t enjoy life. Somebody snatched my health away, and I want to get healthy again.”