New York City council members Margaret Chin and Stephen Levin gathered with first responder groups on the steps of City Hall today to ask that cancer be added to the compensation programs. They also won a concession from Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration to release names of clean-up workers, so the committee could determine whether a link exists between their presence at the site and an incidence of cancer, according to a statement from Levin's office.

New York city officials dropped confidentiality concerns and will provide Mount Sinai Medical Center with names of police department workers who participated in the recovery and clean-up operations as part of an agreement to release more health data on the attacks, Deputy Mayor Cas Holloway said today.

Bloomberg is the founder and majority shareholder of Bloomberg LP.

Long-Running Debate

The debate has been long running. On Jan. 2, President Barack Obama signed legislation to help rescuers, cleanup crews and other people suffering from ailments linked to the World Trade Center wreckage. As of yet, there isn't any compensation for firefighters who get cancer because of toxic exposure.

The decision not to include the disease in the law, which became effective on July 1, followed a review by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health last year that found there was too little evidence to prove a definitive link.

Birnbaum, in a telephone interview prior to today's hearing, said she's spent months telling responders with cancer there isn't enough evidence to link their disease to their experience, and they aren't eligible.

Today's hearing, sponsored by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, will help determine if there is enough data now, she said, though the issue is complicated by many factors.

If cancer victims are added, "everyone would still get paid, but they would get paid less than they were awarded," said Birnbaum, an attorney at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP in New York. "And we all may run out of money."

Higher Risk

In September, a report published in The Lancet, a U.K.- based medical journal, found that firefighters who responded were 19 percent more likely to have cancer in the seven years that followed the attacks than those who weren't there.

The research, the first to tie a higher cancer risk to first responders, spurred federal lawmakers from New York, including Democrats Carolyn Maloney and Jerrold Nadler and Republican Peter King, to request that the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health consider the Lancet study.