Docs: Kids' Post-9/11 Health is Good

By Etta Sanders
POSTED NOV. 1, 2006

A swirl of claims in recent months about the lasting health effects of the World Trade Center attacks has raised worrisome questions about the impact to nearby residents. Evidence mounts that rescue and recovery workers were made ill from their exposure, and recent publicity generated by a Stuyvesant High School graduate, who believes his exposure to the dust made him sick, has magnified the concern.

Lower Manhattan parents, especially, wonder what all the bad news means for their children. The answer, for now at least, may be much more encouraging than the headlines suggest.

Last month the Trib went to the people who know the most about the health of Downtown children: the doctors who treat them. They include three Downtown pediatricians and a Tribeca asthma and allergy specialist. Perhaps no one sees more Downtown kids than Dr. Michel Cohen at Tribeca Pediatrics on Harrison Street in Tribeca. Cohen started his popular practice in the neighborhood 12 years ago. His conclusion, five years after the disaster, is that so far there have been no adverse affects in his many young patients.

“I think I see about 80 percent of kids in Tribeca and Battery Park City and if there was a spike [in a health problems] I would have seen it. Basically, I haven't seen anything,” Cohen said.

Other Downtown doctors shared similar anecdotal findings. Dr. Bonita Franklin opened her first pediatric office in Tribeca in 1988 and moved to her current Reade Street office in 1995. Shortly after the attacks she did see patients with coughs and other symptoms, but those soon subsided. “I’ve seen no increase in respiratory problems in that group that went beyond that first month or two,” she said.

Lower Manhattan children have been a large part of Dr. Lisa Kaufman’s practice at Village Pediatrics on 12th Street for the past 12 years. There may be more pediatric asthma Downtown in recent years, she said, but that is true throughout New York City. “I can’t say my patients in Battery Park City come in coughing and wheezing any more than my other patients. I haven’t seen that,” said Kaufman.

Dr. Steven J. Simonte, an asthma and allergy specialist, who opened an office on Duane Street last year, said he has not seen a higher rate of respiratory problems in lower Manhattan children. But recent reports in the medical literature showing an increase in the respiratory symptoms reported by Downtown residents, “are concerning as to the long term health effects,” he said.

Franklin said she has also seen new asthma cases since Sept. 11, 2001, but she doesn’t draw a connection to the WTC dust and smoke. “The few blips of asthma to me were not convincingly related to the exposure only because that’s really a statistical question,” she said.

The findings so far seem mostly reassuring, yet all of the doctors interviewed said parents continue to approach them with their worries. “About 40 percent of them are just wondering. About 60 percent are sure there will be something,” Kaufman said. “The parents’ anxiety level is high.”

In the months after the attacks, when parents’ worries were at their peak, Franklin said, “I told them we don’t know. And we still don’t know if there will be long term complications.”

There has been relatively little study about the health of residents who were exposed to the dust and smoke from World Trade Center collapse, but those that have been done do show some adverse health affects.

A much-quoted study from 2002 by Dr. Joan Reibman, who runs an asthma program at Bellevue Hospital, compared 2,800 Downtown residents to residents in other New York City neighborhoods. That study documented more new and persistent respiratory symptoms than occurred in a control group.

Another study showed lower birth weights in children born to women who were pregnant at the time they were exposed to the dust and smoke. A study in Chinatown showed a significant increase in the number of clinic visits by pediatric asthma patients in the year after Sept. 11.

No data specifically about residents has yet to come out of the largest monitoring project, the WTC Health Registry, administered by the city’s Department of Health. The Health Registry announced in June that they were beginning their first follow-up surveys, but they are now saying those surveys will be delayed until at least the end of this year.

Franklin said she encouraged families to enroll in the registry, but she believes that very few of them have done so. Registry enrollment ended in 2004, leaving anyone who did not participate unable to join even if later health problems develop.

It may also be hard to track the children who lived in Lower Manhattan at the time, but have since moved away. Doctors outside the city may not be as attuned to asking about World Trade Center dust exposure. It may also be difficult to pinpoint the cause of ailments because of individual variations; the same exposures can have different affects in different people.

Cohen sees the lack of physical problems developing in the five years since the attacks as a positive harbinger. “There were no short-term problems on the respiratory level and I can’t see why there would be long-term problems,” he said.

Others are not so ready to predict the future. “I think there should be some very centralized, organized method to follow these children,” said Kaufman, “I would give it another five years. Until then I don’t think we’ll know.”

Simonte agrees that more study of the children exposed to the dust is needed over time. Exposure to environmental irritants and pollutants typically make asthma symptoms worse, he said, and the developing lungs of children may be particularly susceptible. “In my professional opinion it would seem to make sense that that they would have a greater risk,” he said. “The jury is still out.”

Franklin says she is not sure there will ever be conclusive answers.

“We may never know,” she said. “Somehow I am encouraged by the fact that I’ve seen very little that I could trace to this in the children. I hope it remains that way.”