YHK - yet another hacker news clone

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

36 points EA-3167 1 hour ago 12 comments

Insanity 1 hour ago | parent

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?

donohoe 58 minutes ago | parent

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 41 minutes ago | parent

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 57 minutes ago | parent

That article isn’t paywalled.

T0Bi 49 minutes ago | parent

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

EA-3167 15 minutes ago | parent

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.

joezydeco 34 minutes ago | parent

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.

aurmc 26 minutes ago | parent

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.)

KellyCriterion 3 minutes ago | parent

^^ comment above you :-)

https://archive.ph/I6vOQ

layer8 40 minutes ago | parent

https://archive.ph/I6vOQ

dbt00 31 minutes ago | parent

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

PaulKeeble 26 minutes ago | parent

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.