Years later, ‘9/11 cancer’ sickens thousands who were in nY
NEW YORK CITY (AP) — Jacquelin Febrillet was 26 years old on Sept. 11, 2001 when jihadist hijackers flew two passenger jets into the World Trade Center just two blocks from where she worked.
Fifteen years after the attacks that day, Febrillet, by then a mother of three, was diagnosed with metastatic cancer.
The likely cause: a cloud of toxic ash that engulfed her.“I was there (on) 9/11 … For years I have been working down there every day since 9/11. We were never told that something could happen,” she said.
Unlike Febrillet, Richard Fahrer, then 19, wasn’t in the area on 9/11, but he regularly worked as a land surveyor between 2001 and 2003 in south Manhattan, where the Twin Towers came crashing down.
Eighteen months ago, the young father, now 37, was diagnosed with aggressive colon cancer — a disease that usually affects older men and which there is no history of in his family.
Febrillet and Fahrer represent a growing category of patient who were living or working close to the World Trade Center in the wake of the attacks, which killed almost 3,000 people.
They were not among the thousands of emergency personnel who rushed to the site or who spent months clearing debris at ground zero, but their health is being similarly affected.
As the 18th anniversary of the attacks approaches, New York continues to count the number of people who have developed cancer or other serious illnesses related to the toxic cloud that hovered over Manhattan for several weeks.