Rescuers who put out fires and debris at the site of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, destroyed by terrorists on September 11, 2001, suffer unusually often from blood cancer, doctors said in an article published in JAMA Oncology.
“We found that many rescuers and their volunteers were carriers of monoclonal gammopathy, a precursor to blood cancer, even among young people. This suggests that in the future, firefighters will be significantly more likely to become victims of myeloma than the rest of the city,”said Amit Verma from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York (USA).
Scientists have long suspected that putting out fires is far from safe, not only because fire, heat and smoke can kill a firefighter when trying to save people, but also because being in such an atmosphere can contribute to the development of cancer.
For example, ten years ago, experts from the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) suggested that working as a firefighter could increase the likelihood of developing cancer. Subsequently, this hypothesis was partially confirmed by the American medical services, which monitored the health of the rescuers, and a year ago, Canadian doctors revealed the mechanism of the development of tumors in the body of firefighters.
Verma and his colleagues have long wondered how fighting fires and clearing debris at the World Trade Center site could affect the health of rescuers and their susceptibility to cancer.
The fact is that the collapse of the Twin Towers and the subsequent fire threw into the air a huge amount of asbestos dust, aromatic hydrocarbons and other carcinogens. Most of them settled or remained in the air in the area of the ruins, which were dismantled by rescuers and volunteers for ten months.
As scientists suggested, such a long contact with hazardous substances should have seriously affected the health of the rescuers. To test this idea, they collected and analyzed blood and tissue samples from eight hundred 9/11 liquidators.
The suspicions were justified - those who participated in the analysis of the blockages were about twice as likely to suffer from early forms of myeloma (blood cancer) than the rest of New Yorkers.
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The doctors then checked when the firefighters developed more serious malignancies. As it turned out, the first severe cases of myeloma began to appear in them already at the age of 57 - about 12 years earlier than in other Americans.
All this, as Verma emphasizes, must be taken into account by medical and social services in order to help firefighters avoid the development of blood cancer and minimize the costs of fighting it.