ACS article on WTC dust analysis, Dec 2002

NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document

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World Trade Center dust analysis offers good news fo New Yorkers Source: American Chemical Society News Service Publication date: 2002-^12-23

The rubble has been cleared from the World Trade Center site, but questions sti about the long-term health effects on people who survived the terrorist attacks. study of dust samples taken from around Manhattan in the days following Sept. 2001, could offer some much-needed good news. KOT

i III A team of researchers tested debris from the collapsed towers for toxic organic ... chemicals and found that the potential risk of exposure from inhaling such comp was lower than expected. The findings are scheduled to appear in the Feb. 1 pri SgfcOTOT edition of Environmental Scient ; a peer-reviewed jouirfai of the “American aety, the worid’s largest scientific society. The article wa IB initially pubiished Dec. 18 on the joumal’s Web site. The scientists were looking specifically for persistent organic pollutants — highi I 53SL. compounds that pose a special problem because they endure in the environme can be toxic to humans and wildlife. They found no evidence of high levels of tw particular POPs: pesticides and polychlorinated biphenyls, which were used in hundreds of industrial and commercial applications until their production was ba I 1977.

The team did, however, estimate that the dust covering lower Manhattan contai ■■iiS between 100-1000 tons of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons — a group of comp iliiilB containing some that are classified by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agenc probable human carcinogens. But, while the amount of PAHs was high, the dust particles to which the chemicals stuck were large enough to stay out of a person tungs, according to Paut Lioy, Ph.D., associate director of the Environmental an Occupational Health Sciences Institute in Piscataway, N.J., and an author of the Illi “The fact that the partides were primarily above 10 micrometers in diameter wo mean that the deposition was in the upper airways of the respiratory system and readily cleared than fine particles, which would deposit deeper in the lung,” Lioy “That means, in terms of potential lifetime exposures, we’re probably going to b lud<y in that these may not be exposures of significant health risk.”

Immediately after the attacks, the majority of people focused their attention on i asbestos, Lioy says. But he and his colleagues felt the only way to understand th situation was to determine everything people could possibly have been exposed contrast to what we normally do every day in environmental sciences, this was a catastrophic event,” Lioy says. “We had no clue what was in there and what size ranges, so our goal was to do a full characterization of the entire aerosol.”

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