The Freedom Tower

The Mount Sinai Medical Center in Manhattan today released the findings from the World Trade Center Worker and Volunteer Medical Screening Program, the largest multi-center clinical program providing medical screening examinations for the workers and volunteers who worked at Ground Zero and other sites following the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11.

The report has been accepted by Environmental Health Perspectives, the journal of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, and will be published on Thursday, September 7. The paper will be available for members of the working press in the “press - embargo” section of the EHP website at http://www.ehponline.org/. The findings are based upon medical examinations performed between July 2002 and April 2004 on 9,500 WTC responders. These responders were a highly diverse group and included members of the building trades, law enforcement officers, firefighters, utilities and telecommunications workers, transit workers, and many others. All received a comprehensive examination that included complete physical examination, mental health evaluation, pulmonary function tests, chest x-ray, blood tests and urinalysis. Overall, the monitoring program examined close to 12,000 responders during the 21-month period covered by the study; 9,500 of whom agreed to allow their results to be used in this report.

The report found that a high proportion of those examined became sick as a result of their World Trade Center work. It found also that illnesses have persisted in the years since September 11 in a high proportion of the workers. In one area alone – pulmonary function tests - the study found WTC responders had abnormalities at a rate twice that expected in the comparable U.S. population and that these abnormalities persisted for many months and, in some cases, years after exposure.

“Many who worked at Ground Zero in the early days after the attacks have sustained serious and lasting health problems as a direct result of their exposure to the environment there,” said Dennis Charney, Dean for Academic and Scientific Affairs, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, which has been running a number of medical and mental health programs serving responders since July 2002. “This study scientifically confirms high rates of respiratory problems in a large number of responders – including construction workers, law enforcement officers, utilities workers and public sector workers.”

The study published today focuses on respiratory health consequences, one of the earliest areas of concern to emerge. The study found that many responders were symptomatic, with high rates of pulmonary function abnormalities as long as two-and-a-half years after the disaster. The findings are particularly striking, in that the workers who served at the World Trade Center tended to be vigorous, healthy workers who held jobs in strenuous professions such as the building and utility trades before September 11.