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Residents Hear Reports on 9/11 Health Impacts They are called the living victims. They are the rescue workers and Downtown residents who suffer respiratory and other health problems from the air they breathed in the months after the attack. “It is abundantly clear that thousands of people are already sick. Eventually, thousands more will be afflicted with late-onset, chronic illnesses. Every day, every hour, more people begin to develop symptoms or become sicker,” said Congressman Jerold Nadler at a Sept. 7 press conference. That same day, at a well-attended town hall meeting at St. Paul’s Church on Sept. 7, federal 9/11 health coordinator John Howard listened for more than two hours to the results of scientific studies and the testimony of neighborhood residents. Following the meeting he said he believes Downtown residents have suffered ill health as a result of their exposure to the dust from the collapse of the towers. “I don’t think there is any doubt in my mind that there’s an association,” Howard said. A study at Bellevue Hospital that compared the health effects on 2,800 Lower Manhattan residents to a control group of New Yorker’s living more than five miles away from the World Trade Center found persistent ailments. Sixty percent of Lower Manhattan residents who participated suffered from new respiratory problems compared with only 20 percent in the control group, according to Dr. Joan Reibman, Associate Professor of Medicine and Environmental Medicine. Some of those symptoms subsided, Reibman said, “but the bad news is that the number of people with persistent symptoms remained higher in the exposed group than in the control group.” More information will come from the World Trade Center Health Registry, the largest effort to track the after effects of the attacks. The registry, administered by the city Department of Health (DOH), has enrolled 71,000 participants who were Downtown on Sept. 11, 2001 and is issuing follow-up questionnaires this year. Reibman and Howard urged Downtown residents to participate. “When it comes to the residents we have very little information. It is critical that people respond to that second survey,” Reibman said. Howard, the director of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, said information gathered by the registry is essential to securing government money for monitoring and treatment. “That will answer the question of how persistent are those respiratory symptoms now five or six years later after the event. That is vital information.” Earlier in the day Nadler announced legislation to provide medical coverage for anyone with a Sept. 11 related illness under Medicare. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton will be sponsoring similar legislation in the Senate. Nadler said government bears responsibility because of EPA false claims about the safety of the air in the weeks after the attacks and the failure of the city to enforce the use of protective gear at the site. “The federal, state and city governments are clearly culpable for recklessly allowing thousands of people to be exposed to environmental toxins in the days following 9/11,” he said. On Sept. 5 Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the city would provide $16 million over the next five years to fund a WTC Environmental Health Center at Bellevue Hospital/NYU, which will enable it to assess and treat up to 6,000 additional patients. The Center is scheduled to open in January 2007. There were concerns about having the city’s Department of Health (DOH) as the oversight agency. “When the DOH issued ill-advised guidelines, advising residents to clean up indoor spaces contaminated with WTC dust with wet rags and mops in the early days of the recovery process, it became directly responsible for countless unnecessary exposures. Residents are concerned that this same agency will play a major role in the implementation of the Mayor’s program,” said Nadler.
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