User:Gofigure41/Stephen M. Levin

Stephen M. Levin M.D. ...

Dr. Stephen Levin

Overview

Stephen “Steve Levin” (Oct. 16, 1941- February 8, 2012) was the Medical Director of the Mount Sinai Irving Selikoff Center for Occupational and Environmental Medicine, a Professor of Occupational Medicine at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

Early Profession: Community Medicine and Social Justice Work

As a young medical student, Dr. Levin devoted significant amounts of time directly to social justice issues. This include work with the Young Lords Organization (YLO), a Puerto Rican civil rights group, who exposed Steve to "the conditions some people in East Harlem had to live in. Frozen cascades of water from leaking pipes running down the stairs… he more I learned about the causes of the social and economic inequalities in this country and the rest of the world, the more I felt I had to try to be part of changing the conditions people face….” As a family doctor in the factory town of Pottstown, Pennsylvania, Dr. Levin charged his patients what they could afford: $2 for workers, $7 for management. He also worked with community organizers fighting against racial discrimination in the educational system, worked as a doctor in the state prison and ran the town's Planned Parenthood clinic. In (NEED DATE), Dr. Levin assisted members of the United Rubber Workers to get vinyl chloride removed from a local plant. When management refused to provide the workers with respirators, a group of plant workers organized a protest, which Dr. Levin supported. This protest led to shut down of the plant and three days later, respirators were provided. Dr. Levin considered this experience "eye opening." He realized that, "science and facts alone don’t always change what happens to people, but when people use these facts in combination with political means, big changes can result, in this case definitely changing health and safety conditions on the job."

Work at Mount Sinai with State and Governmental Regulators

In (NEED DATE) Dr. Levin joined the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and his career there over many decades included a lengthy list of accomplishments improving the health and safety of workers and citizens:

• In the 1990s, Dr. Levin worked to ensure that federal and New York State authorities required the provision of respirators and vacuum hoses to protect bridge workers from lead poisoning.
• Dr. Levin testified on behalf of the people of the State of New York in 2000 and 2004 in the trials of Joseph Thorn and father and son Alexander and Raul Salvagno, owners of asbestos abatement companies in New York. Both Thorn and the Salvagnos were convicted of illegal and unsafe asbestos removal techniques without proper protection. The Salvagnos secretly co-owned a lab that produced 75,000 fraudulent laboratory analysis results on asbestos levels.
• Dr. Levin was one of the two primary investigators for a project on asbestos exposure among electrical power generation workers in Puerto Rico.
• Dr. Levin was also the primary investigator into the contamination of Libby, Montana with asbestos and the deaths of hundreds of workers and family members there. W.R. Grace, now in federal bankruptcy protection, operated a large asbestos-contaminated vermiculite mine.
• Dr. Levin and his colleagues at Mount Sinai started planning what would become the clinic for WTC workers just days after 9/11. Ninety percent of the 10,116 firefighters and other responders reported an acute cough within the first 48 hours, as a study the clinic put out three years later would document. The clinic, which has received more than $12 million in government grants and funding has already screened and treated more than 20,000 workers, and released over a dozen studies. One 2006 study showed that approximately 30% of the patients screened (at that point, 12,000) suffered from chronic asthma and bronchitis, and 17% suffered from PTSD and depression.
• Dr. Levin was heavily involved in the passage of the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act.

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External links

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