By Nathaniel "Beltway" Steele
Twenty-five years after the towers fell, the accounting isn't finished. NBC News' "Cost of Denial" series reported this week that first responders who worked at Ground Zero are now being diagnosed with dementia at rates researchers believe are tied to their exposure to toxins at the site — a condition not currently covered by the World Trade Center Health Program, which pays for treatment of other 9/11-linked illnesses.
The anniversary arrived under heightened watch. ABC News reported a federal bulletin was issued ahead of Sept. 11, warning that terrorist organizations continue to encourage attacks — a reminder that the day carries live security weight a quarter-century later, not just remembrance.
That remembrance took many forms. The New York Times revisited its own photographers' images from Sept. 11, 2001, and its aftermath, describing them as "too heart-wrenching to look at, and too important to look away from" even as their emotional charge fades with time and distance for younger Americans. Overseas, U.S. service members marked the day too: at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, Army Col. Christian Labra, a physician and Purple Heart recipient, spoke at a memorial ceremony attended by American and German first responders, according to U.S. Central Command. The ceremony marked 25 years since the attacks killed 2,977 people at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
The dementia fight now moves to Washington, where advocates will press Congress and program administrators to add the condition to the list of covered illnesses. It is, by any measure, an uphill argument — but it is the kind of fight this country owes the people who went into those buildings when everyone else was running out.
Read the footnotes. The story's always in the footnotes.
— Compiled from reporting by NBC News, ABC News, The New York Times and U.S. Central Command (DVIDS).
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