25 years later, the toll of 9/11-related illnesses continues to grow
By Sophie Naimi · Reporting from Paris ·
The world likes its tragedies to have a closing ceremony. We prefer a date on a calendar, a plaque in the stone, and a scheduled moment of silence.
The world likes its tragedies to have a closing ceremony. We prefer a date on a calendar, a plaque in the stone, and a scheduled moment of silence. But for the people who breathed in the ruins of Lower Manhattan, the catastrophe never ended; it simply changed its pace.
As we mark 25 years since the attacks, the New York City memorial ceremony is finally adding a moment of silence for those who died from 9/11-related illnesses. It is a gesture that is twenty-five years too late. According to reporting from waer.org, nearly 13,000 people have died from 9/11-related illnesses to date—more than double the death toll of the towers themselves. Dr. Raja Flores, a thoracic surgeon at Mount Sinai Hospital, puts it with a devastating clarity: it is easier for the public to comprehend a sudden catastrophe of 3,000 deaths than the slow, grinding reality of 8,000 subsequent deaths occurring "one funeral at a time."
This is not a medical mystery. It is a predictable environmental crime.
The Residue of the Ruins
The tragedy of Ground Zero was not just the collapse of steel and glass, but the creation of a toxic wasteland. First responders encountered a "white toxic dust," as noted by the Chicago Tribune, which acted as a slow-acting poison. We see the result in Mike Fagel, a FEMA expert who spent 100 days at the site and now operates with one kidney and a lung functioning at only 25%, battling three forms of cancer and an autoimmune condition. We see it in Sgt. Jeffrey Cicora, who died in 2019 from a rare soft tissue sarcoma traced directly to his work at the site.
This is the exact mechanism of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. In 1945, the world focused on the flash of the atomic blast—the acute, visible horror. But the true scale of the atrocity unfolded in the decades that followed, as radiation poisoning and leukemia decimated the survivors in a slow-motion massacre. The shared mechanism is the same: an initial catastrophic event followed by a prolonged, invisible poisoning of the environment and the body. Whether it is ionizing radiation in Japan or caustic dust in New York, the result is a debt that the human body pays in installments over a lifetime.
We have seen this pattern repeat with a sickening regularity. The struggle for recognition for "burn pits" exposure in the Iraq War mirrors the fight for 9/11 health fund support, where the state treats the lungs of its soldiers as disposable filters. Similarly, the ongoing health monitoring of cleanup workers after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster proves that the "cleanup" is often just another phase of exposure.
The Ledger of Failure
The most capable defenders of the status quo will argue that the United States has been exemplary in its response. They will point to the National World Trade Center Health Program and the Victim Compensation Fund as proof of a state that cares. They will argue that the deaths are the tragic, inevitable cost of operating in a war zone.
This is a lie of omission. A compensation fund is not a healthcare system; it is a ledger of failure. If the state had prioritized the physics of toxicity over the optics of "recovery," thousands of people like Mike Fagel would not be spending 2026 attending eighty medical appointments a year. The fact that the number of survivors receiving aid for cancer has tripled over the last five years, as reported by The Washington Post, is not a sign of a functioning system—it is evidence of a mounting health crisis that the state failed to prevent.
Even the powerful are not immune, though they fare better. Former Governor George Pataki has been diagnosed with a 9/11-related lung condition, yet his diagnosis serves only to highlight the disparity for those like Randy Leek, a former firefighter who suffered a massive heart attack in 2024 linked to elevated mercury levels. This is the "Long COVID" of the 21st century—a secondary, prolonged crisis that emerges long after the cameras have left.
The pattern is clear: the state is always faster at paying for a funeral than it is at protecting a worker.
The state treats the bodies of its first responders as acceptable collateral for the narrative of resilience. By waiting twenty-five years to institutionalize a moment of silence for the poisoned, the city admits that it viewed these deaths as a footnote to the "real" tragedy. We must stop treating environmental toxicity as an accidental byproduct of disaster and start treating it as a policy choice. Until we stop prioritizing the speed of "getting back to normal" over the safety of those doing the cleaning, we are simply waiting for the next generation of survivors to start dying.