Fallon, NV:
In Tiny Town, 11 Kids Get Cancer 

Why? 

DANIEL Q. HANEY / AP 14dec03

FALLON, NV—Maybe the first person to realize something terrible was happening to the children of Fallon was a nurse at the community hospital.

It was summer 2000, and Dr. James Hockenberry had recently diagnosed two cases of childhood leukemia. His son Timothy, also a family practitioner, had seen another. These are the tragedies doctors encounter even in small towns, and neither man put them together.

Then one day, Tim Hockenberry was working in the emergency room, and the chemotherapy nurse, Barbara de Braga, stopped to see him.

''She came walking in and closed the door behind her,'' Hockenberry says. ''She said, 'I'm concerned. I think we may have a cancer cluster going on.' I remember the blood drained out of my face and just thinking, 'Oh, my God.'"

She counted them up: The Hockenberrys' three cases plus one more, all within a year. Soon calls were made. By the time state health officials got to the hospital, there was a fifth case. Then quickly a sixth. And a seventh. All in Fallon.

''People were starting to feel panicky, even the health care professionals,'' de Braga says. ''Everyone was looking at children and saying, 'Are they pale? Do they have bruises?'" Possible signs of leukemia.

One thing seemed certain. This could hardly be a coincidence. In a town the size of Fallon, just one case of childhood leukemia would be expected in five years. And in the 1990s, that is what happened: one case in 1992 and one in 1999.

But that 1999 case—Dustin Gross, then 3—was the start of an incredible spike. Through 2001, 11 cases were diagnosed in Fallon and surrounding Churchill County. Eventually, five more were found between 1997 and 2002 among children who had moved away.

Little is known for certain about what causes this disease. Some think exposure to radiation in the womb or early childhood can contribute. But for most cases, there is no clear answer.

During the 1960s and '70s, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention investigated 108 cancer clusters around the United States, most of them childhood leukemia, in hope of proving that a virus, a chemical or some other contaminant caused the disease.

In the end, they found nothing.

In the decades since then, the source of these cancer outbreaks remained as much a mystery as ever. In fact, not a single geographic cluster was ever solved to scientists' satisfaction.

Still, the Fallon outbreak was especially sudden and large. State health officials decided an inquiry was essential.

So began the most intensive investigation ever into a cancer cluster. That summer and fall, a team led by Randall Todd, the state epidemiologist, put the young victims' parents through three-hour sessions. They asked where they lived when their child got sick, where they lived before that, whether they drank tap water or bottled, the kind of chemicals they used, whether crop sprayers flew nearby, and so on.

''Was there some common trait they all had?'' Todd asked.

They found none.

At least three things, though, seemed to make Fallon different: Its municipal water has among the country's highest levels of naturally occurring arsenic, 10 times federal standards. A pipeline carries jet fuel across the desert to Fallon's Navy air base. And 40 years earlier, an underground nuclear test was done just 30 miles away.

While federal investigators planned studies, the state tested a dozen wells plus the town water.

There is no evidence that arsenic, dangerous as it is, causes childhood leukemia. The level of the town water—100 parts per million—was well-known, but the amount in people's wells was another matter. In some of the victims' wells, the testing found off-the-charts amounts, eight times higher even than the town water. But nothing suggested it caused a sudden surge in cancer.

There was no trace of jet fuel in the water, either, and the only radioactive material was slight amounts of the natural kind.

In the end, the CDC tested for more than 100 pesticides, metals and other contaminants in blood and urine, along with more than 100 in soil, 70 in house dust and 60 in air samples. They showed the cancer families had virtually the same exposure to these things as did healthy neighbors.

All of this is in a four-inch stack of reports in Todd's office in Carson City. The bottom line: Nobody knows why the cancer occurred.

Because cancer has many possible origins, including random genetic mutations, there is no way to say what caused any individual's disease. That's why the researchers focused on the families' shared exposures.

Although toxins in the environment were the main target of the investigation, they aren't typically a major cause of cancer. And if an environmental poison was to blame, everybody in Fallon may have received it to some degree, making it impossible to prove the cause.

Theories about viruses are also kicked about. But in truth, there are no strong suspects, and some now wonder if the real answer may be one they rejected so certainly at the investigation's start. Could all of those cancer cases in one small place have been just an against-the-odds roll of the dice?

Dr. Les Robison, head of pediatric epidemiology at the University of Minnesota, believes so. ''My interpretation is what we are probably looking at is a random occurrence of chance.''

That is the likeliest reason behind most cancer clusters, says Dr. Michael Thun, the cancer society's epidemiology chief. ''Throw confetti out of an airplane, and some will fall in clusters. It's a terribly unsatisfying explanation to anyone.''

source: http://www.suntimes.com/output/health/cst-nws-cancer14.html 14dec03

Reference:  Gould The Enemy Within: The High Cost of Living Near Nuclear Reactors-Breast Cancer, AIDS, Low Birthweights, and Other Radiation Induced Immune Deficiency Effects¸ Four Walls Eight Windows 1996.