Are firefighters becoming too fat?

Article in Daily Mail about firefighters having to deal with obese patients over here in the UK [more in 'From the Pan Into the Fire' on my blog]. It’s the severest form of irony that they’re suffering from obesity themselves. I thought that they spent time not responding to emergencies doing exercises?

The content of the report and the title don’t match.

It isn’t the firefighters who are becoming to fat, but the pool of the general population from which firefighters are drawn. Given the ongoing fitness requirements in my town for firefighters to maintain employment, I rather think that it is correlated with less obesity over time, not more. They are quite rigorous.

Now the police on the other hand—some of those guys are HUGE around here.

I would note that almost any male with a muscular build is overweight, according to the current BMI standards. It gives one pause to think that a 5’7″ female and 5’7″ male are expected to fall within the same healthy BMI parameters. I would suspect that the better firefighters are more muscular than the average population. Thus, I would put less weight on the “overweight” category. Overweight and obese are, in my opinion, two very different things.

there is currently a case in a midwestern city where a firefighter or cop (i’m not sure) was fired for being so obese he couldn’t do the duties his job required.

He sued and the city is planning on hiring him back.

I certainly wouldn’t want a blind pilot with a seizure disorder flying my plane home from vacation.

Any job that requires physical fitness as part of the job requirement, should require a physical endurance test. It is not asking to much. “I certainly wouldn’t want a blind pilot with a seizure disorder flying my plane home from vacation.” That is a bit of a ridiculous comparison. Comparing a blind pilot to an overweight fireman, who may be in great shape otherwise? Puh-leese!
Should we be measuring the BMI of cardiac surgeons before they can operate? Plenty of health care professionals smoke, drink and take crap care of themselves. Should they be subject to physical fitness tests before caring for patients?

reality rounds, being so obese as a cop or a fire fighter that you can’t do the duties your job requires is the same as a blind pilot with a seizure disorder flying you home. It is the same as a surgeon with no arms.

If you’re too fat or too skinny or too stupid to do the duties required in your job, you should be fired.

I have seen numerous EMS and FD personnel that are ridiculously morbidly obese. I understand that muscular people are “overweight” but that is not what I am talking about. I am talking about people that are waddling behind the stretcher they are pushing and being ridiculously SOB while giving report. This should NOT be allowed!