AP news article regarding WTC forwarded, May 2002

NYC 9/11 Public Portal Document

lower Manjiattan after Sept. 11, and it received more than 170 as&estos-related complaints. Charles Sturcken, the department's chief of staff, said inspectors found only one violation _ a failure to properly register a project that was otherwise safely carried out. "If there's a complaint about asbestos, we'll look into it," Sturcken said. "If we don't catch them, we don't catch them. That's unfortunate."

Between Jan. 14 and Feb. 25, the Queens College medical team examined 410 immigrant workers from Ecuador, Colombia, Peru and the Dominican Republic. Its findings are expected in June. Nearly all were suffering from two groups of symptoms: a combination of upper airway irritation, coughing, sore throat, chest discomfort and nasal congestion; and a cluster consisting of headaches, insomnia, poor appetite and dizziness, Markowitz said. Perhaps one or two of every thousand workers who cleaned buildings without proper protection could develop mesothelioma, a rare cancer affecting the sac lining of the chest or abdomen, said Levin, of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Levin said he based his estimate on construction workers like plumbers and electricians, whose mesothelioma rates have generally run below 1 in 1,000. Cancers linked to asbestos almost certainly would not appear for decades. That workers had symptoms weeks after they stopped working indicates health problems beyond simple irritation from inhaling the dust, Markowitz said. High concentrations of pulverized glass or fiberglass certainly could have harmed workers' respiratory systems, Markowitz said. Alkaline dust dissolving in the water and mucus of the airways also could have been caustic enough to cause damage, he said. "I'm at a loss, really, to explain why people had those symptoms," Markowitz said. "I say the dust was toxic because we have human proof." (See attached file: mweissenstein.vcf)

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