David E. Worby, JD is a trial lawyer who specializes in personal injury cases. He is a published author in American Trial Lawyers Magazine.
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Worby graduated from Villanova University Law School in 1976 with a JD.
He has since founded the following:
He was also a Senior Member of the Development Leadership Council at the Law School.
Worby represents the largest number of clients experiencing Ground Zero illnesses. According to New York Magazine: "[Worby] is a New York lawyer, who filed the first lawsuit for a leukemia-stricken NYPD detective who served at Ground Zero and the Fresh Kills landfill, a case that mushroomed into a massive class action with 8,000 WTC workers.".[1]
By September 2007, the number of plaintiffs in the case reached 10,000. "I started this suit on behalf of one cop that got sick ... Nobody would touch the case with a 10 foot pole because it was considered unpatriotic to say anything against the cleanup or the EPA."[2]
Worby faults government officials for individuals' illnesses:
"They are getting sick because of people like Christine Todd Whitman and Rudy Giuliani ... [M]y people don't want their names to be on the wall, because they are not victims of terrorists --they're victims of bad government. Giuliani should be banned from public office for what he did."[3]
Worby's firm has filed suit against the City of New York, the Port Authority and the Environmental Protection Agency. The suits allege that dust from the 9/11 attacks made the plaintiffs sick, and seek billions of dollars in funding for medical screening and treatment and billions more in damages. The majority of the plaintiffs are suffering from asthma, sinusitis, chronic bronchitis. But others have kidney and heart problems. Worby claimed at least 100 victims are suffering from various kinds of cancer, including leukemia, Hodgkin's disease, and esophageal and thyroid cancers.
According to a report in New York Magazine some doctors believe that and have said that the carcinogens in the WTC dust accelerated cancers that were already under way in some rescue workers, either by promoting further mutations in genes whose cancerous transformations were nearly complete, or by tampering with genes that suppress these deadly mutations. Exposure to the unprecedented combination of carcinogens and immune suppressants in the dust caused shortened latency periods for cancers that would generally take far longer to develop.[4]
When she became aware that many others who had been at Ground Zero were sick, Sister Cindy Mahoney, also known as Cynthia L. Mahoney, tracked down Worby and asked him to use any posthumous findings from her body and her autopsy to fight for the health of 9/11 workers.
Mahoney suffered from asthma, reactive airways dysfunction syndrome, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and gastroesophageal reflux disease, due to Ground Zero exposure, and which hastened her own death at the age of 54 on November 1, 2006.