The 9/11 dust is still making people ill: Ground Zero cancer cases up 75% in three years, more than 57,000 diagnosed

Cancer diagnoses among people exposed to the toxic dust of Ground Zero have risen sharply over the past three years, Northwell Health said on Tuesday, days before the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks.

At a press conference at Long Island Jewish Medical Center in New Hyde Park, doctors running Northwell's World Trade Center Health Program said certified 9/11-related cancer cases in their cohort rose from 177 in 2023 to 235 in 2025, a 75% increase. The programme has recorded 811 new cases over the past 42 months, against 1,634 cases in its entire first decade. Prostate and skin cancers were the most common, followed by breast and urinary tract cancers.

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Across the federal World Trade Center Health Program, which now has about 145,000 enrolled members, more than 57,000 people have been diagnosed with cancer. The programme, administered by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, provides free monitoring and treatment for certified 9/11-related conditions to responders and to survivors who lived, worked or studied in the disaster area. Roughly 30% of Northwell's own enrolled patients have been diagnosed with cancer, the health system said.

Speaking to People magazine, Dr Jacqueline Moline, director of the Northwell World Trade Center Health Program, said the risk has not receded with time. "Hundreds of thousands of people were at risk then and remain at risk for disease now," she told the magazine, adding that respiratory illness dominated the early years but cancer is now the growing burden, with lung cancer cases having doubled in five years.

At Tuesday's briefing, Moline said some cancers are surfacing earlier than expected, citing multiple myeloma patients in their late 30s and early 40s. The disease typically affects people in their 70s.

'Twenty-three years later'

Frank Kotnik, 66, of Glendale, Queens, a retired blacksmith with New York City's Department of Transportation, worked 20-hour shifts cutting steel at Ground Zero in the weeks after the attacks. He was diagnosed with bladder cancer more than two decades on, having already watched colleagues fall ill.

Recounting the diagnosis to People magazine, Kotnik said the only thing that surprised him was how long it had taken. He said doctors told him he had 9/11 bladder cancer, and his response was that it had come 23 years later.

Felicia Ivey-Toure, 58, of Jamaica, Queens, had no symptoms at all. She was working at St Vincent's Hospital in Greenwich Village, since closed, on the day of the attacks. Her thyroid cancer was found only when doctors treating her after a car crash on the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge discovered a mass. She had no family history of the disease, Northwell researchers told People magazine.

"I never correlated it with cancer. Never correlated it with the World Trade Center," Ivey-Toure said at Tuesday's press conference. She underwent a thyroidectomy and continues to have nodules in her lungs monitored. Both she and Kotnik are now in remission.

When the towers collapsed, thousands of tonnes of building material were pulverised into a dust cloud containing asbestos, benzene, heavy metals and crushed glass and cement. Northwell said the mixture contained roughly 150 chemicals and has now caused more illness and death than the attacks themselves.

City opens its 9/11 records

The data landed the same day New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani released more than 170,000 pages of previously undisclosed records on air quality around Ground Zero, through a public portal funded with $34 million. The documents, found in 68 boxes at a city office last year, include contamination data and correspondence among officials. Mamdani said asbestos was found nearly everywhere the city tested, even as residents and workers were told the air was safe to breathe.

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The release settles two Freedom of Information Law requests and includes a 2001 internal memo warning the city could face as many as 35,000 liability claims. Moline said the withheld information carried a clinical cost, telling reporters the programme could have tailored its screening and testing had that knowledge been available at the time.

Doctors at the briefing urged anyone with a possible exposure history to stay on top of screenings and report persistent symptoms.