Public health researchers in New York, struggling to determine the real Dimensions of the health threat at the World Trade Center site. Are beginning an ambitious series of long-term studies to identify and then track a wide range of people who lived through the nightmare of dust, smoke and stress when the: towers fell. Two Manhattan hospitals, for instance, are collecting blood samples from pregnant women who say they were in the vicinity of the trade center on the; morning of Sept. 11 or in the days afterward. Mount Sinai School of Medicine will send out 3,000 letters to obstetricians in the region as early as next week, also seeking pregnant women who were near ground zero for a related study that will look at the possible effects of maternal anxiety as well as toxic substances in the air. Beginning next Monday, physicians and investigators from Queens College will start searching for nonunion day laborers, many of them now dispersed into the work force, who helped clean up dust-saturated buildings around the trade center in the weeks just after the attacks The New York Academy of Medicine is beginning an even more ambitious task. Building a registry of every person - from the firefighters to members of the New York City Transit tunnel crews - who worked, even for a day, at ground zero . The researchers say that while these studies are, in certain respects, the sort of work that invariably follows major disasters and accidents, they also say that the variety of the inquiries reflects a disturbing but ever-growing realization among health experts: four months after the attacks, very little can be said with scientific certainty about the health risks that recovery workers or bystanders faced in the disaster and the cleanup. That uncertainty, which some health and environmental experts now say was perhaps not adequately reflected by public officials in the days and weeks after the attacks, underscores how unique the World Trade Center disaster was as a public health emergency. The blast of dust and smoke - and the toxic substances, fibers and ash that blew through New York in the days afterward - is without precedent in medical literature, which means that there are no studies to fall back on for guidance on whether to be alarmed or reassured.
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