The events of 9/11 played into two fears that Americans harbor: a) the very real fear of Islamic terrorism, and b) the largely imaginary fear of environmental poisoning. What do I mean by the latter? If you were reading a whodunit mystery novel and it ended with the coroner declaring that the victim died of natural causes, it wouldn’t be much of a story. That is the conclusion of researchers who have analyzed mortality associated with hazardous materials exposure during and after the World Trade Center (WTC) collapse.
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The best mortality studies do not show that the 9/11-exposed population has higher mortality than comparable New York or U.S. populations. In several cohorts, observed mortality has been lower than population expectations, especially among responders. That is thought to reflect a strong healthy-worker effect: firefighters, police, construction workers, and other responders were healthier on average than the general population before 9/11. A large 15-year study pooling roughly 60,000 rescue and recovery workers from the Twin Towers’ site concluded that there was no excess overall mortality or excess mortality from the major causes of death compared with U.S. or New York State populations.
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Environmental poisoning has been a fashionable bogeyman ever since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) appeared. Over the intervening years, the environmental pollutant that has attracted public attention has shifted from DDT to dioxins, lead, asbestos, etc., but essentially it acts as a stand-in for our ever-present fear that our modern man-made environment is poisoning us. In our collective imagination, the cloud of dust from the WTC collapse, largely composed of pulverized concrete, concealed carcinogenic toxins that would certainly shorten one’s lifespan. However, the evidence tells a different story.
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