Many N.F.L. Players Get Brain Disease. Why Hasn’t OSHA Intervened?
New York Times · LC · trust 28/100
“We never see things that are this dire,” a former chief scientist of the agency said about rates of C.T.E. in former players.
“We never see things that are this dire,” a former chief scientist of the agency said about rates of C.T.E. in former players.
The former N.F.L. player Jonathan Martin entering an M.R.I. machine for a brain examination that was part of a study to develop treatments for the symptoms and illnesses linked to C.T.E. Credit... Jason Andrew for The New York Times
The most notorious form of workplace illness in the United States might be black lung disease. Scientists say that 10 to 20 percent of coal miners who have worked 25 years or more have gotten it. It has long been considered an epidemic.
Imagine an American job that is less safe than that, where one in four workers (and maybe far more) ends up with an incurable, degenerative brain disease that withers the mind, sometimes after just a few years of exposure.
Imagine the outrage at the working conditions, the demands that something be done to protect the employees, the questions about whether the industry needed to be overhauled, if not abolished.
“I don’t think that this would be abided in any industry,” said Doug Parker, the head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration under the Biden administration.
Unless that profession was N.F.L. football.
New research shows that 25 percent of all former N.F.L. players who died during a recent six-year period had the degenerative brain disease known as C.T.E. — a tally that does not include the nearly three-quarters of deceased players who were not tested for the disease, which can be diagnosed only posthumously.
“That is clearly a minimum; the true percentage has to be higher,” said David Michaels, who was head of OSHA from 2009 to 2017, just as C.T.E. emerged as a health issue in football. “Whatever it is, the number is astoundingly high.”
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