WTC Rescue and Cleanup Workers Suffering Serious Health Problems

By Linda Orlando

A draft report from Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City has revealed that thousands of rescue and recovery workers who spent time at the rubble of the World Trade Center are still suffering from health problems, many of them serious and life-threatening. The report has not been released yet, but it describes the medical condition of over 9,000 people who worked at the site or in the cleanup effort. Most of the workers are men working in construction or law enforcement.

New York City is fast approaching the five-year anniversary of the largest terrorist attack on United States soil, and the cleanup and recovery is still not complete. Mount Sinai has been maintaining a World Trade Center Medical Monitoring Program since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and the medical evidence revealed by the program suggests that rescue and recovery workers are sicker than the general population. According to the doctors involved with the program, ""The health effects of rescue recovery and volunteer work at the WTC site were highly prevalent, severe and persistent in the nearly 10,000 workers we saw clinically between 2002 and 2004."

Doctors say that the Mount Sinai findings are significant. "We're willing to say that the medical problems persist. The pulmonary problems, the sinus problems, the indigestion, the breathing test abnormalities persist in these workers at much higher rates than are found in the population in general," said Dr. Jacqueline Moline. The report details sharp increases in respiratory symptoms after 9/11, including lung problems affecting five times more people than in the general population. One-third of the workers exhibited abnormal lung capacity one to two years after exposure. Patients with the highest rates of lung problems were the ones who were engulfed in the dust could that could be seen for miles after the twin towers collapsed.

The draft of the report also reveals that although 17% of the study participants were forced to miss work because of their health problems related to 9/11, many people could not participate in the program because their employers would not give them paid time off from work to participate. Rep. Jerrold Nadler said, "This report is very important not because it doesn't tell us anything that we didn't know, but because it makes it much harder to deny. All kinds of government officials are still denying that all these injuries, (this) inability to work, are work-related."

The Mount Sinai doctors involved in the program warned that the illnesses are likely to get worse, saying, "There may be future late-emerging health consequences, possibly including cancers among the World Trade Center responder population." Doctors believe most cases of cancer won’t show up for at least 10 years after 9/11, but hundreds of people have already claimed that they have developed World Trade Center-related cancer.