Experts Still Debating Link Between 9/11 and Mesothelioma

January 24, 2007 - Since September 11, 2001, nearly 100 ground zero workers have died.  While doctors have definitively linked the work with respiratory illness, other experts have hesitated to officially link deaths to the exposure, saying it is easy to misinterpret some diseases, like cancer, as being connected to ground zero when other factors may be at play.

A recent Associated Press article by Amy Westfeldt cites a study published last fall by the largest monitoring program for post-9/11 workers, which found that nearly 70 percent were likely to have lifelong breathing problems.  Experts say, however, that research hasn't proven yet that all the deaths are connected - particularly cancer, a leading cause of death in the nation, which could be falsely linked to trade center exposure.

To date, many first responders and others who worked at the site have died of diseases such as sarcoidosis, mesothelioma, and pulmonary disease; diseases that should have been unknown to the many young and healthy people who worked at ground zero in the days immediately following the disaster.  Their families are convinced that exposure to toxins triggered their diseases.

Still, others aren’t so sure.  The article notes that doctors at Mount Sinai Medical Center, which has screened 19,000 of the believed 40,000 ground zero workers, say they still need to rule out cases of people whose exposure simply triggered an illness they were already predisposed to contract. The doctors, said program spokeswoman Leslie Schwartz, don't know what the workers "went working into ground zero with."

David Reeve, whose 41-year-old wife Deborah died of meso last April, is convinced that if she hadn’t worked at the scene, she’d still be alive today.  His wife's primary doctor, Reynaldo Alonso, wrote a letter nine months before Deborah died, stating that her only exposure to asbestos and other carcinogens came from her work at the trade center site. "It is reasonable to state that her exposure at ground zero was the cause of her cancer," Alonso wrote.