Released: September 01, 2006

New York issues guide to 9/11 illnesses

Source: By Anthony DePalma, New York Times (Free Registration)

Days before the fifth anniversary of the terror attack on the World Trade Center, New York City health officials yesterday started mailing to every doctor in the city the first formal set of clinical guidelines to diagnose and treat physical and mental health problems related to the disaster.

The city had been sharply criticized by medical experts and labor leaders for declining to issue the guidelines in late 2001 when the first health problems started to arise, and in subsequent years. Experts have said that lacking a formal advisory from the city, doctors may not have had sufficient information to recognize the ailments connected to 9/11, or to prescribe the proper treatment.

“It’s about time these were mailed to every doctor in the city,” said Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, a Manhattan Democrat who has been critical of the city’s health response to 9/11. “My only question is: why has it taken five years?”

Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, commissioner of the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, said the city had been hesitant to issue guidelines until it had sufficient scientific evidence linking the dust to serious and persistent illnesses.

Such data, he said, did not become available until 2004 when the Mount Sinai Center for Occupational and Environmental Medicine reported that more than half the people it had examined in a special program had developed serious respiratory problems after they worked in the recovery operations at ground zero.

Now, officials say there is no longer any doubt that certain illnesses are related to 9/11. 

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