The above-cited study, from the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, makes for chilling reading. Because mice weren't the main victims of World Trade Center dust -- that toxic cocktail launched into the air of New York city by 90,000 liters of jet fuel burning at above 1,000 degrees Celsius, and then by the collapse of the towers. New Yorkers were breathing soot, metals, hydrochloric acid; cement dust, glass fibers, asbestos; lead, PCBs, dioxins and more. In fact, air sampling of the plume of smoke rising from the site found it to have a pH level of 9 or 10 -- roughly that of ammonia.

So what happens when New Yorkers for miles around are breathing in acids and asbestos and worse?

The study reports that pregnant women within a 10-block radius of the trade center at the time of the 9/11 attack were twice as likely to have smaller-than-average babies. It reports that 332 fire fighters have had to take more than a month's medical leave over severe coughs and respiratory symptoms (termed "World Trade Center cough" in their medical files). In general, it finds, many previously healthy persons living near Ground Zero began to experience coughing, wheezing and shortness of breath. And it notes that 3,000 children lived within 1 kilometer of the site -- which burned for more than three months -- and that 5,500 children went to school there. They'll need close watching, too.

"It's much more serious than we initially realized," says Dr. Philip Landrigan, principal author of the study and director of Environmental and Occupational Medicine at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York. Landrigan -- whose earlier research has influenced Congress to legislate pesticides out of our food, and has guided Bill Clinton on dealing with Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses -- tells Newsweek magazine, "It took awhile to realize just how toxic this dust was."

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But what should not have taken awhile was to warn people working at Ground Zero to take the most basic precautions.

"One problem is that no one was insisting that workers wear respirators," Landrigan says. "I wouldn't fault anyone in the first 48 hours during the immediate response," he adds, "but for months afterward most workers at Ground Zero were still not wearing respirators and, in my mind, that is a terrible failure in regulation and it's going to result in a lot of diseases that could have been prevented."

Why didn't people wear respirators? Ask John Graham, a carpenter and an EMT who was nearby when the planes hit the towers, rushed to help, and ended up staying for nine months. He says he didn't wear a respirator when he first started working at the site because he believed the air was safe -- because Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christie Whitman had publicly declared it so. Today, Newsweek reports, Graham can't work as a carpenter because of asthma attacks; he's taken a pay cut to teach safety to carpenters, but even has lesson-stopping asthma attacks in the class room. "The government lied to us," he says. "They said the air was clean."

We now know, of course, that the EPA did indeed lie. The EPA's own Inspector General has documented how the White House insisted that EPA press releases warning of dangers be changed -- because, as the White House has said, it wanted Wall Street to reopen a.s.a.p. EPA's own employees have raged at "this outrageous action of President Bush's staff."

And sure, reopening Wall Street was important. But what's exasperating is that one could have warned people to take precautions with the air and reopened Wall Street anyway. Americans were more than ready to pull together and make sacrifices -- witness the outpouring of Ground Zero volunteers -- and Wall Streeters were no different. They'd have come to work in respirators too if need be. It was arrogance, and incompetence, to lie to people that the air was safe when it wasn't.

President George W. Bush will visit New York city this summer for the August 30-September 2 Republican National Convention -- scheduled later than usual this year so that the President can bask in the reflected solemnity of another 9/11 anniversary. I wonder if he'd care to sit down across the table from carpenter Graham -- or across from any of the women who gave birth to low-weight babies -- or from any of the 1,700 cops and firefighters suing the city for Ground Zero health ailments -- to explain why his White House overruled worried EPA scientists to insist that the air was clean.

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