A new study released this week says thousands of World Trade Center responders have developed chronic and disabling illnesses that are likely to be permanent.

Dr. Robin Herbert, co-director of the Mount Sinai Medical Center program which monitored affected workers says the study shows almost 7 out of every 10 ground zero responders were suffering from lung problems.

Of most concern are the needs of 40,000 first-responders and clean-up workers who experts say inhaled a toxic soup of lead, mercury, dioxin, asbestos, benzene and other contaminants from the debris of the collapsed towers.

The news comes as lawyers and others appearing at a hearing before the House Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats, and International Relations, are criticising the government’s public assurances about the air around the World Trade Center site, lying to New Yorkers and endangering public health.

Critics, among them Democratic Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, are accusing federal officials of failing to protect ground zero workers as they clambered over the smoldering mountain of toxic debris and not properly caring for them in the years since.

Christie Todd Whitman, the former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, is on record as saying in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, that the air in lower Manhattan was safe, although she also said workers at the World Trade Center site needed to use protective breathing gear.

Whitman is now being sued over those public assurances, and is being accused of doing too little to protect workers.

Republican Christopher Shays, Chairman of the hearing, has already said Whitman’s statements defy logic, while Whitman continues to insist that it was the responsibility of local authorities to make sure the rescue workers wore protective breathing gear.

New York city officials who are also under fire for their own role in the ongoing health problems, have disputed Whitman’s response, with the city’s Health Commissioner Thomas Frieden saying the federal government was responsible for work safety at the site, and Whitman’s post-Sept. 11 assurance, was an inappropriately worded message.

Meanwhile New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has defended the city’s handling of the disaster, and says it did distribute masks.

Family members have spoken of the abandonment of sufferers in the months and years after the attacks with one father, of 34-year-old NYC police detective James Zadroga, who died early this year from a respiratory disease attributed to ground zero exposure, saying his son ‘was treated like a dog’.

Although the Bush administration has said it will continue to help those Sept. 11 workers who are still sick, it has not said what their long-term health needs might cost.

Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt has said that $75 million will be delivered in the next two months to pay for treatment programs but others say this not nearly enough to provide all the treatment needed for those suffering from lung problems, gastrointestinal disease and mental health issues and the potential cost of treating the long-term health effects of 9/11 is daunting.

Researchers are also closely monitoring the development of hundreds of children, born early and underweight, to women living in Lower Manhattan.

A team led by child health expert Dr. Federica Perera, of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, has tracked the birth outcomes and long-term development of more than 300 babies born to women living near the site who were pregnant on Sept. 11, 2001.

They say the babies born to women who had been living within a two-mile radius of the World Trade Center site during the months following 9/11 weighed significantly less at birth and all women, regardless of their proximity to the site, gave birth slightly earlier than usual.

As the tendency toward smaller birth weights continued even after Perera’s team adjusted for this prematurity, they suggest the pollutants had an effect.

It seems blood tests on newborns’ umbilical cords did confirm relatively high levels of combustion-linked toxins called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in babies born to mothers living in Lower Manhattan.

These children are now 4 and 5 years of age, and Perera and her team are studying the impact of the disaster on their ongoing health and development.