For three days following the attacks on the World Trade Center, ironworker Alexander Cambell practically lived where the buildings continued to burn. He quickly began having difficulty breathing. He developed respiratory infections. He eventually needed to call an ambulance to take him to the hospital, where, during a nine-day stay, he received a diagnosis of asthma.
Campbell returned to the site for ten days in March 2002 to remove steel and help build a ramp descending into the pit. But that was followed by four more visits to the hospital by year’s end. He developed pneumonia and depression, as well as food allergies that causes his esophagus to swell.
He takes 18 different medications a day and has been unable to work since 2004.
“I’ve wanted to stop taking these drugs,” Campbell says, “and my doctors tell me ‘It’s irresponsible, you need to stay on the drugs’.”
Campbell, 57, a non-smoker whose only breathing problem before 9/11 was a bout with childhood asthma, blames his illnesses on the sooty dust he breathed in at the World Trade Center site, a toxic soup comprised of hundreds of thousands of tons of pulverized concrete, glass and other building materials.
He is far from alone. An estimated 70,000 people participated in the rescue and recovery work that followed the attacks, with tens of thousands more living or working in the area.
Research has already shown that 9/11 rescue and recovery workers commonly continue to suffer from multiple illnesses, including asthma, sinusitis, and chronic heartburn caused by gastroesophageal reflux disease (a stomach acid condition).
“Any organ opening to our breathing system could be irritated by that dust,” says Michael Crane, M.D., deputy director of the World Trade Center Medical Monitoring and Treatment Program at Mt. Sinai Medical Center.
While few have become symptomfree, the good news is that these symptoms are highly controllable, most often with the use of drugs, Crane says.
However, the biggest issue now is cancer. Hundreds with a significant exposure to the dust have been afflicted with various cancers, including those of the lung, upper intestines, esophagus and brain, as well as lymphomas and melanomas. Research so far has shown a 10 percent increase in cancer rates among WTC workers as compared to those not exposed, says Crane. But it takes longer than a decade for many of these cancers to even develop, so continued studies are important.
“You need to get beyond ten years,” Crane says, “to get a pretty good understanding of cancer exposure in an occupational environment.”
What particularly troubles Crane is that rare cancers such as sarcomas and carcinoid tumors (tumors with endocrine activity) are coming to the fore.
“There seems to be a number of rare cancers that are very unusual and whose behavior is very uncertain,” he says. “It’s hard to say what is causing them. We’ve had superb pathologists tell us, ‘I’ve never seen that before.’
“One concern that I have is that we’ll continue to see an abundance of these kinds of things that we are not quite sure how to treat, and we don’t know their true behavior because they’re so rare,” he says. “These are things that keep me up at night.”
Anyone with exposure to Ground Zero can contact the WTC Health Program via their website.