Sept. 11 workers come down with blood cell cancers

NEW YORK – The head of the largest program tracking the health of World Trade Center site workers said several have developed rare blood cell cancers, raising fears that cancer will become a “third wave” of illnesses among those exposed to toxic dust after Sept. 11.

Dr. Robin Herbert, co-director of the World Trade Center Medical Monitoring Program at Mount Sinai Medical Center, said researchers who have screened 20,000 of the estimated 40,000 ground zero workers are “most concerned” about lymphatic and blood cancer cases.

“We’re worried about a third wave, which is the possibility of cancer down the road,” Herbert said in an audiotaped interview posted on the New England Journal of Medicine’s Web site.

“The kind of thing that worries us is that we know we have a handful of cases of multiple myeloma in very young individuals, and multiple myeloma is a condition that … almost always presents later in life,” she added. “That’s the kind of odd, unusual and troubling finding that we’re seeing already.”

Doctors had previously said it was too soon to know whether any cancers can be linked to trade center dust exposure, although Mount Sinai published research last year that said about 70 percent of the workers they screened had respiratory illnesses.

Herbert didn’t say in her audiotaped interview how many blood cell cancer cases the Mount Sinai program was tracking.

An attorney representing thousands of workers and residents said that more than 100 of his clients have blood cell cancers. About eight have multiple myeloma, David Worby said. Most of his clients are in their 30s or 40s, he said.

More than half of all cases of multiple myeloma, a plasma cell cancer that spreads throughout bone marrow, occur in people over 70, and about 1 percent of cases occur in people under 40, according to the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation in Norwalk, Conn.

Herbert, referring to cancer as a possible third wave of disease, said the first was the chronic coughing and acute respiratory problems that workers got right after their post-Sept. 11 work.

Second, she said, are more serious chronic lung diseases such as sarcoidosis, which killed a New York woman who inhaled dust from the collapsing twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001. The city medical examiner last week added Felicia Dunn-Jones’ 2002 death to the official list of Sept. 11 attack victims.