MADRID, 1 Mar. (EUROPA PRESS) –
A private medical center in the state of Ohio has reported that many of its patients share similar symptoms, including a burning sensation when breathing, skin rashes or general weakness, all after the derailment of a train carrying chemicals.
This was reported by the workers of the Quick Med Urgent Carte in Columbiana, who have detailed that they are seeing “more and more people” coming from East Palestine — the town where the train derailed on February 3 — and complaining that they don’t feel well, ‘The Hill’ has reported.
They all share symptoms such as a burning sensation when breathing, skin rashes or general weakness. In addition, when they start to feel better and are discharged, they soon return to the hospital because they feel unwell again.
“It could be any number of things, but if you leave the house and the ‘symptoms’ get better, and you come back and it comes back, I don’t think it’s allergies and I don’t think it’s a cold,” said Quick Med spokeswoman Deb Weese, noting that he believes these symptoms are related to what people in East Palestine are inhaling.
He has also asserted that the burning sensation when breathing could be a form of chemical bronchitis, urging anyone suffering from similar symptoms to seek treatment.
“Let’s be real: If the case comes, it could be something in the future derived from all these chemicals that they are breathing and that we don’t know about, so it is important that they document all their symptoms,” Weese told the aforementioned newspaper.
The US health authorities and the residents of the city of East Palestine, in the state of Ohio, are going through a period of serious uncertainty while waiting to elucidate the long-term effects of the derailment, on February 3, of a freight train with dangerous chemical substances that forced the temporary evacuation of the town, whose citizens demand a full investigation of what happened before resuming their normal lives.
Part of this investigation concerns the train itself operated by Norfolk Southern. Company employees, on condition of anonymity, revealed this week to CBS that the vehicle had experienced mechanical failure two days before the derailment and that it was carrying an obviously exaggerated load: 151 wagons, including twenty with harmful elements, for a total weight of about 18,000 tons. So far, the US National Transportation Safety Board has found “preliminary signs of mechanical problems in one of the axes,” pending further information.
A total of 38 of these wagons ended up leaving the track, of which at least eleven contained butyl acrylate and, above all, vinyl chloride gas, used for the manufacture of plastics and potentially carcinogenic. The fire sparked by the derailment — accompanied by an explosion that sent a fireball nearly a kilometer up — forced the immediate evacuation of much of East Palestine’s 4,700 residents due to both the release of gas in the railcars derailed as in the other nine cars with toxic substances that were still on the road.