The Other Victims of 9/11

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Intelligencer Unsubscribe	Fri, Sep 4, 2:30 AM (2 days ago)
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September 3, 2026 SEPTEMBER 11 The Other Victims of 9/11 Twenty-five years after the attack, tens of thousands of people, like me, have been diagnosed with serious illness. By Lukas I. Alpert Photo: Tony Stone It took 18 years for me to realize I was a victim of September 11. In 2019, I received an email from Chaka Ferguson, a former colleague from the New York City bureau of the Associated Press, asking for a favor. We had worked together at Ground Zero in the weeks and months after the Twin Towers collapsed, but I hadn’t heard from him in over a decade. Ferguson told me he’d since been diagnosed with thyroid cancer, believed it was connected to the toxic air around the site, and was planning to apply to the World Trade Center Health Program and Victim’s Compensation Fund. Could I write an affidavit swearing he had been there? I told him I was happy to and that I was particularly sympathetic. I had also been diagnosed with thyroid cancer four years earlier. The significance of his email didn’t register with me until later. “I don’t think it’s just a coincidence,” he wrote back to me. “That both of us had thyroid cancer after working at Ground Zero.”