9/11 Responders were shrouded in a toxic dust that included mercury, lead, and asbestos
Firefighters race to get one of their own out of harms way on September 11th.

Photo used under GNU license.

 NEW YORK- It was a day we will never forget. You and I still know where we were when we heard the news. Whether you were in New York or Tokyo or Texas, the news of hijacked planes striking the World Trade Centers and the shock of their collapse is something that will stay with you forever.

I was in a class and over the PA system it was announced that we would have a moment of silence for the victims of the terrorist attacks that had just occurred. At the time everyone was going crazy and calling friends and relatives (many of whom worked in and around the area) to check on them. By the time I made it to a computer WTC2 had just collapsed and my heart sank.

In the aftermath of the collapse, many of the heroes of that day were shrouded in a toxic dust that has left up to 70% of rescuers and cleanup workers with chronic health problems for the rest of their lives.

A study released this week by the Mount Sinai Medical Center conclusively links recovery work at the World Trade Center ruins and long-term respiratory problems according to the studies authors.

"There should no longer be any doubt about the health effects of the World Trade Center. Our patients are sick," said Dr. Robin Herbert, co-director of the group that has monitored the health of nearly 16,000 ground zero workers.

Herbert said the majority of patients in the study first came to ground zero between Sept. 11 and Sept. 13, 2001, which exposed them to asbestos, pulverized concrete, mercury, plastics, and toxins that will leave them chronically sick.

"Our patients were very, very highly exposed, and are likely to suffer health consequences as a result of that for the rest of their lives," she said.

The study will appear Thursday in the journal, Environmental Health Perspectives. It focused on what has come to be called "World Trade Center cough" in 9,442 ground zero workers examined between July 2002 and April 2004.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg reacted negatively to the study's claims, saying, "I don't believe that you can say specifically link a particular problem came from this particular event."

Those studied include construction workers, police and firefighters and other volunteers who worked at the site, in the city morgue or at a landfill where more than 1 million tons (910,000 metric tons) of trade center debris were carted.

The study said that almost 70 percent of trade center responders had new or worsened respiratory problems during or after the attacks. Sixty-one percent of responders who had no health symptoms before the attacks developed problems while working at ground zero. One third of those tested had abnormal lung function, which Herbert said is a rate twice as high as the nonsmoking population.