A new study was released today, revealing that a small number of law enforcement officers who helped in the World Trade Center rescue and cleanup operation have since been diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a cancer of the immune system.
In the study published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, researchers from Mount Sinai School of Medicine examined 28,252 emergency respondents who had previously worked in the dusty ruins of ground zero. Within this large number of people, eight cases of multiple myeloma were found.
One individual was caught in a dust cloud on 9/11 and then worked long hours there for months. Another worked at the Staten Island landfill, where the rubble was transferred, for 111 days. The two others had less exposure, only working about 12 to 14 days each in the pit and debris.
In addition to being small, the numbers aren’t necessarily a surprise given that multiple myeloma is the second most common hematological cancer in the U.S. after non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Researchers would normally expect to find just about seven cases in a group that size.
So if these results seem typical, what makes researchers think there’s a link to the debris from 9/11?
A couple details surrounding the cancer patients suggest a connection to having worked in the rubble. For example, four of the eight individuals were under the age of 45; an oddity for this particular cancer, because the disease is diagnosed most regularly in patients an average of 71 years old.
Even though these results are slightly intriguing, no study to date, including the one published today, has proven a link between dust from 9/11’s wreckage and cancer, stated Lorna Thorpe, a deputy commissioner and epidemiologist at New York City’s health department.
Additionally, the majority of published research done on multiple myeloma indicates that it typically takes 10 to 20 years for it to develop in someone who has had environmental exposure to a carcinogen. In these cases, the cancers were diagnosed in as little as three to four years after the attacks, suggesting that something else – potentially the dust exposure from 9/11 – caused the disease.
Source: Fox News
