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The author of this article drew on first hand accounts of the WTC attacks from fire, police, and EMS personel, as well as witnesses to reconstruct the events that transpired on the morning of 9/11/01 with regards to the response. The author also conducted and cited interviews with high ranking active and retired members of the Police and Fire Departments, such as FDNY Chiefs and officers and NYPD Commissioners. Based on this, the author examines specific shortcomings, such as lack of coordination between Fire and Police, comminication barriers, and the overwhelming and uncoordinated response by both on and off-duty firefighters.

"Third, we have seen that structural interventions can have an enormous impact on outcomes, even in the face of cost­effectiveness analyses and the flawed policies of international bodies"

"These are not the tasks for which clinicians were trained, but they are central to the struggle to reduce premature suffering and death. The importance of structural interventions for the future of health care means that practitioners of medicine and public health must make common cause with others who are trained to intervene more proximally."

"Pioneers of modern public health during the nineteenth century, such as Rudolph Virchow, understood that epidemic disease and dismal life expectancies were tightly linked to social conditions"

• “Sometimes the foreigner, too, is no more than his body, but this body is no longer the same: useless to the political economy, it now finds its place in a new moral economy that values suffering over labor and compassion more than rights.”
• “Deontologically, the medical officers were caught between the duties mandated to them by the public institution that employed them and those their profession required them to respect…”
• “The logic of state sovereignty in the control of immigration clearly prevailed over the universality of the principle of the right to life. The compassion protocol had met its limit.”

1) "Approaches based on preparedness may not be guided by rigorous cost-benefit analysis. Rather, they are aimed at developing the capability to respond to various types of potentially catastrophic biological events"

2) "This analytical approach, when turned to the field of biosecurity, makes neither broad prescriptions for the improvement of health and security, nor blanket denunciations of new biosecurity interventions. Rather, it examines how policymakers, scientists, and security planners have constituted potential future events as biosecurity threats, and have responded by criticizing, redeploying, or reworking existing apparatuses"

3) "But increased attention and funding to health preparedness by no means implies consensus around a single approach. The existing institutions of public health are not easily reconciled with the new demands and norms of health preparedness and there is considerable disagreement about the appropriate way to achieve preparedness."

Data from this study could be an indicator to public health officials of a new, possibly overlooked, aspect to health in the aftermath of a major disasterm and could be used to create new programs or policies to combat this in the future.

1) "The most bizarre, and perhaps most telling, moment in the hearing occurred when Rep Anthony D. Weiner of New York, addressing the panel of experts, asked for the person in charge of the investigation to raise his hand. When three hands went up..."

2) "Clashes over authority among powerful institutions both public and private, competition among rival experts for influence, inquiry into a disaster elevated to the status of a memorial for the dead: these are the base elements of the World Trade Center investigation. And yet, even a brief historical review shows us that these elements are not unique."

3) "They were not reassuring, or especially enlightening answers. Some things were already known."

Amerindian populations in Canada have been plauged with mental illness and suicide for many decades, and  even though there were studies done and extensive research available, there was very little done to respond to this crisis, allowing it to keep reoccuring. 

1) "In this new state of social world, the body of the immigrant has become illegitimate as labor force, since it is always suspected of deleteriously affecting the job market, but the body of the foreigner has found a new source of legitimacy through illness, which, under certain conditions of seriousness and impossibility of receiving treatment in the country of origin, makes it possible to obtain a residence permit on "humanitarian grounds."

2) "Yet the variation in medical opinions observed was due less to the form of the procedure than to the use the medical officer made of it."

3) "Evaluation of this criterion, however, was not the outcome of a unilateral decision by the examining doctor or the social worker. Foreigners and their families might also develop tactics once they knew how the system worked."