On Sept. 11, 2001, Nadia Vizueta was a 20-year-old journalism student at NYU living close enough to the Twin Towers that she saw the plane hit the second building.
In the months that followed, Vizueta said she spent a lot of time at and around Ground Zero reporting on the aftermath of the attacks, including through an undergraduate journalism course called “9/11 Storytelling.”
“It didn't even cross my mind that the air that I was breathing in could possibly be toxic,” said Vizueta, who's now 45 and a survivor of a rare form of breast cancer that has qualified her for care through the federal World Trade Center Health Program. “You almost feel invincible at that age.”
Nadia Vizueta, 45, seen with her family, in a 2022 photo.
Twenty-five years after the attacks, the World Trade Center Health Program is making a push to recruit more patients who were under 21 on 9/11 and have since developed health conditions related to their proximity to Ground Zero. The program offers free healthcare through a network of providers across the country to those who qualify.
The program will also soon be recruiting people in this age group who were living or attending school in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn in the aftermath of the attacks to participate in research on their long-term health. Mayor Zohran Mamdani drew fresh attention to the potential health effects associated with 9/11 this week when he posted a trove of documents online concerning air quality in the city following the attacks.
Some advocates for youth survivors of 9/11 say they have been pushing for greater attention to this age group for years.
Researchers with the city health department have estimated there were close to 100,000 children living in or attending school in parts of Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn who were potentially exposed to toxins and other hazards in 9/11's aftermath. But fewer than 3,000 are included in a registry the department maintains to track the health of World Trade Center survivors over time.
And of the 150,000 or so patients currently enrolled in the World Trade Center Health Program, only about 3,000, or 2%, were under 21 on 9/11, said Capt. Kristi Anderson, the program’s chief medical officer. She said many more could be experiencing 9/11-related health effects such as asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, cancer or post-traumatic stress disorder.
“Some of those conditions don't necessarily show up for years, decades after exposure, and so that's why some people may be missing the connection” to 9/11, Anderson said.
Vizueta said she began reflecting more on her exposure to Ground Zero after she was diagnosed with metaplastic breast cancer at age 39. She said enrolling in the World Trade Center Health Program helped her access treatments that would not otherwise have been covered by her insurance.
But Lila Nordstrom, who was a student at Stuyvesant High School in Battery Park City on 9/11, said she was well aware of the potential health hazards at the time and was never under the impression that she was “invincible.”
After the attacks, students at Stuyvesant briefly attended classes at Brooklyn Tech, but returned to their building a few blocks from Ground Zero on Oct. 9, 2001. News articles and other documents included in the city’s newly established archive on 9/11 discuss asbestos testing at the building and capture the public debate that raged at the time over whether it was safe for students to return so quickly.
“That exposure severely exacerbated my asthma and then I also very quickly got diagnosed with quite serious GERD and sinusitis,” Nordstrom said. She said she qualified early on for care through city programs that preceded the World Trade Center Health Program and then for the federal program itself after it was established in 2011.
In 2006, Nordstrom founded the advocacy group Stuy Health to help others in her age group connect with services. More than 20 schools in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn are in the World Trade Center Health Program’s qualifying “disaster area,” according to Stuy Health.
Nordstrom said she has also long been advocating for more research on the health effects of 9/11 on those who were children and young adults at the time.
Researching the health effects of 9/11 on young people
Even 25 years after the attacks, there are still big gaps in the research on those who were children or in utero on 9/11, said Dr. Joan Reibman, who previously served as medical director of the World Trade Center Environmental Health Center, a program run by NYC Health and Hospitals that serves survivors, and recently retired from her position as a professor of medicine at NYU Langone.
“These people were exposed at a very different time in their lives compared to the adults and so their response to their exposures may be different,” she said.
For instance, she said, children may have “had hand-to-mouth exposures. They crawled. They ate off the floor.”
Congress passed legislation in late 2022 requiring the World Trade Center Health Program to establish a Youth Research Cohort of people who were under 21 on 9/11 and may have been exposed to health hazards in Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan. The program is required to research their long-term health in comparison with a control group that was not exposed.
But federal research on this youth cohort won’t get underway until enough study participants have been recruited, and that recruiting effort has not yet officially started, said Anthony Gardner, a public affairs specialist with the World Trade Center Health Program. Those who are interested can sign up for updates online.
Vizueta said that in the meantime, she encourages people who were in the vicinity of Ground Zero when they were younger to keep a close eye on their health and be aware of the conditions that might qualify them for the World Trade Center Health Program.
“ I'm confident that the program has helped me stay alive,” she said.
Find out more about the World Trade Center Health Program, the Youth Research Cohort and the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund.
