Health study begins on effects of 9/11

NEW YORK -- One of the biggest public health investigations in history opened Friday in Lower Manhattan, aiming to follow the long- term physical and mental journeys of up to 200,000 people who were exposed to fire and smoke on Sept. 11, 2001.

New York City and federal health officials said that depending on the public's response, the project, called the World Trade Center Health Registry, could end up as much as five times the size of the investigation after the Three-Mile Island nuclear accident in Pennsylvania in 1979. That study tracked 38,000 people.

The $20 million federally financed project, which has been in the planning stage for more than a year, is supposed to create a portrait of a place that fundamentally no longer exists -- the city-within- the city that emerged on and around ground zero. But unlike Three Mile Island, the city that was forged from New York's disaster largely dispersed over time.

Volunteers from all over the region and the nation came for a day or a week or a month and returned home. Tens of thousands of jobs moved out of Lower Manhattan, and many residents picked up and left. And no one even has a clue about how many business travelers or tourists were near the trade center that day.

But the biggest wrinkle, organizers say, may be motivating people to volunteer to participate. Some 300,000 people are eligible for participation, but they will have to come forward and relive what they went through in those horrendous days -- where they were, what they felt and what, if any, health effects they experienced, then or in the time since. The study's organizers will then want to stay in touch, off and on, for the next 20 years. Much of the project's start- up budget will pay for the billboards, direct-mail solicitations, Internet ads and brochures that will urge people to step forward.

Most medical experts have said that they don't expect long-term health effects or higher cancer rates in the general population, primarily because for most people, exposure to the trade center's pollutants was fairly brief. Most health research suggests that chronic long-term exposure is usually the way people get sick from pollution. But total certainty, the experts say, is not possible.

People accepted into the registry (organizers are looking for the 200,000 who were most exposed) will be given a 30-minute, confidential interview.

In general, registry organizers are looking for people who were residing, working, visiting or going to school in the area of the trade center on 9/11, or who worked or volunteered in the recovery operations at ground zero or on Staten Island. More specific information is available at (866) 692-9827, or by calling 311, the city's information line. It may also be found online at wtcregistry.org.

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