Twenty-five years after the World Trade Center terror attack on September 11, 2001, physicians and patients gathered at Northwell’s Long Island Jewish (LIJ) Medical Center to commemorate the grim anniversary and to sound the alarm to an ongoing health crisis. The past is prologue for a slow-motion health disaster as cancer cases have exploded among some of the approximately 145,000 people currently enrolled in the World Trade Center (WTC) Health Program, which provides free medical monitoring.
Northwell Health is one of seven federally funded New York Metro organizations to treat responders at its clinic in Rego Park, Queens, and by specialists throughout New York’s largest health system. Two thirds of all enrollees are certified for at least one WTC-related health condition and 30 percent of those enrolled through Northwell have battled cancer. That number is expected to rise dramatically over the next decade.
“For over 25 years, we have cared for people who were exposed to the aftermath of September 11th,” said Jacqueline Moline, MD, director of Northwell WTC Health Program. “Hundreds of thousands of people were at risk then and remain at risk for disease now. While we initially saw respiratory disease, we now are faced with increasing numbers of our patients developing cancer. Over 57,000 cases of cancer have been documented, and cancer rates – including rare cancers – are rising. There has been a twofold increase in lung cancer in just five years. Our fear is that cancer diagnoses will only rise as we move into the next 25 years.”…