New York thoracic surgeon: "For many patients 9/11 is not over"

PaulKeeble•about 1 hour ago

Governments and medicine tend to track deaths as the only bad outcome from events like 9/11 or Covid. But typically there are a lot more people injured who suffer for the rest of their lives with the consequences, damage and chronic conditions that these events have left them with. We do need to put a lot more research into understanding and improving the quality of life of those with chronic conditions, Historically they have been ignored and are currently highly stigmatised by governments, the press and the populace.

Diseases that lead to death have had substantially better funding over the past 100s of years and chronic conditions are often rarely diagnosed, properly recognised let alone treated. The disabled is a club almost everyone joins at some point in there life and everyone is one accident or infection away from joining it for the the rest of their life. At the moment societies recognition and treatment of those with these conditions is really bad. The 9/11 survivors will be suffering for the rest of their lives. Medicine is something we all want, but at the moment the amount invested by governments is quite low compared to the upside impact on humanity of finding real answers.

dbt00•about 1 hour ago

Jon Stewart to his credit has done a tremendous amount of work on this.

layer8•about 1 hour ago

https://archive.ph/I6vOQ

Insanity•about 2 hours ago

Paywalled, and I'm not creating a 'free account'. But instead of it being related to 9/11, couldn't it just be related to other factors, e.g air pollution generally in NYC around turn of the millennium?

aurmc•about 1 hour ago

If that were the case, then everyone who lived/worked near Ground Zero in the months before 9/11 would have had these same health consequences.

Instead, it's clear that that isn't the case. Plenty of research, including studies on firefighters and other first responders on 9/11 and the days after (and plenty of anecdata from doctors around here) have borne out that the health effects from being around Ground Zero for the first couple of weeks after 9/11 was much deadlier than simply breathing in mild air pollution.

(In addition, while I didn't live here at the turn of the century... what air pollution? Manhattan doesn't have a collection of coal power plants near Wall Street. It doesn't have more ICE cars than most other cities; it probably had fewer ICE cars per square mile than an ordinary Wal-mart parking lot in the suburbs.)

blackguardx•28 minutes ago

When I lived there 15 years ago, many of the apartment buildings used heating oil furnaces for winter heat. These definitely contributed to lower air quality in the winter.

joezydeco•about 1 hour ago

The first 40 floors of the WTC towers had steel beams coated in an asbestos insulating material. The regulations changed mid-construction but the lower floors remained.

About 400 tons of asbestos was thrown into the atmosphere around Manhattan when the towers fell.

40four•9 minutes ago

Reader mode circumvents the pay wall on many news sites, including this one :)

KellyCriterion•36 minutes ago

^^ comment above you :-)

https://archive.ph/I6vOQ

donohoe•about 2 hours ago

It was not paywalled for me. To your other point, sure, but you can see the normal rate of cancer in a population over time and then see the spikes in the years directly after 2001.

The distinction is that the strongest evidence is among responders, workers, residents, and others who were directly exposed, rather than showing that cancer suddenly increased across all of NYC.

Insanity•about 1 hour ago

Gotcha, I guess that does point at more impact from the event itself. There is a login-wall for me (not technically paywall), asking me to create an account.

EA-3167•about 2 hours ago

That article isn’t paywalled.

T0Bi•about 1 hour ago

It's "login-walled" for me as well.

EA-3167•about 1 hour ago

With an x at the top right… if you click it then it goes away and doesn’t bother you again.

Realistically if you want the level of professionalism and coverage a site like Stat produces you are going to have to pay for some of it. The alternative is the “free” internet which is increasingly worthless slop.

New York thoracic surgeon: "For many patients 9/11 is not over"

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