PADOH Fiddles (With Data) While Hometown Suffers
The Pennsylvania Department of Health's cancer study that will be the subject of the Jan. 18 public meeting at the Hometown Fire Co. claims to show that local residents and natives have nothing to worry about when it comes to health damage from the area's toxic pollution.
Unfortunately for us, it does nothing of the sort.
PADOH undertook its latest study of the area after local residents blasted its previous study, released in September 2004, for failing to adequately explore unusual patterns of illnesses associated with environmental pollution. PADOH conducted the first study after learning that three residents of Ben Titus Road in Still Creek just north of Hometown - a community located downhill from the McAdoo Associates Superfund toxic waste site and Northeastern Power Co.'s waste-coal-burning plant and downwind of the Air Products industrial gas facility - were suffering from polycythemia vera. A malignant stem-cell disorder affecting the blood, PV is relatively rare in the United States, with studies finding incidence rates for the condition ranging from 1 in 50,000 to 1 in a million. So its triple appearance in a small rural community understandably set off alarms.
I don't have a copy of the latest PADOH study yet, but Hometown resident Joe Murphy does, and he was kind enough to fax me a few pages. For those of us concerned about the area's environmental health, the report is far from reassuring.
To begin with, PADOH found that the Carbon-Luzerne-Schuylkill county area has elevated incidence rates of 12 cancers compared to the state: melanoma in Carbon; stomach, colorectal, larynx, uterus, thyroid, leukemia and PV in Luzerne; and mouth, colorectal, cervix and uterus in Schuylkill. The study also found a "significantly elevated" incidence of PV in Luzerne County. While PADOH's report downplays environmental pollution's role in these cancers and blames "modifiable risk factors," PV is not associated with diet like colon cancer, or with smoking like lung cancer, or with human papillomavirus like cervical cancer. But the condition is associated with exposure to benzene, one of the many pollutants in the toxic stew that is McAdoo Associates.
Furthermore, despite local residents' request to compare local cancer rates to national rates, PADOH continues to compare local rates to state rates. But Pennsylvania has the fifth-highest cancer rate in the nation. What would happen if PADOH were to compare local rates to the national rate? Dante Picciano of the Tamaqua environmental nonprofit Army for a Clean Environment did just that:
"The U.S. annual incidence rate for cervical cancer is 8.4 cases per 100,000," Picciano writes. "Schuylkill County has 15.2 cases per 100,000. The national average for colon and rectum cancer is 53.1 cases per 100,000. Schuylkill County has 71.5 cases per 100,000.
"DOH reports a total of 354 cases of polycythemia vera throughout the entire state for 2001-2002. Luzerne County has 32 cases (9%) and Schuylkill County had 12 cases (3.4%). In other words, Luzerne and Schuylkill County had 12.4% (44 cases) of polycythemia vera in the state during 2001-2002. If you assume a conservative occurrence rate of 1 case per 50,000 people per year, Luzerne and Schuylkill Counties would need a population of 1,100,000 (22 x 50,000) to be within the normal rate for the state. In fact, Luzerne and Schuylkill Counties have a combined population of approximately 470,000. Thus, polycythemia vera is occurring at about 2.3 times the normal rate in Schuylkill and Luzerne Counties."
PADOH's single-minded focus on cancer also limits the study's usefulness. Even though locals report what seem to be high rates of other autoimmune disorders including Graves' disease and multiple sclerosis, PADOH looked only at cancer. And the study was lazy in its methodology. Faced with the serious concern that something's wrong with a community's health, PADOH didn't bother to send anyone to talk with local residents or even to survey them by mail or phone. PADOH staff simply sat at their desks, crunched some readily available numbers, and drew conclusions utterly disconnected from the reality on the ground.
Hello, PADOH? Too many people in the Hometown area are sick. If you don't believe me, ask the doctors. Ask the pharmacists. Ask the oncologists. There's something wrong there. When are you going to stop fiddling with statistics and do something to help people? In tiny little Still Creek alone, three people are suffering from PV. Doesn't that set off alarm bells for you? And it's not just PV. When my father was dying of kidney cancer in 1998, three other men in that Hometown neighborhood - one next door to my family's house, one four doors away, the other five doors away - also were suffering from kidney cancer. They have all since died. Within a few doors of my family's home, there have been at least two brain cancers, six breast cancers, an intestinal cancer, lung cancer, testicular cancer, three cases of Graves' disease, two Parkinson's disease, one rheumatoid arthritis, and one polymyositis, a rare autoimmune disorder in which the body attacks its own muscles. And have you heard about all the cases of multiple sclerosis in Hometown?
Doesn't all that autoimmune illness in one small, rural community worry you? Don't you want to know what's happening there? Don't you think a door-to-door survey is in order to assess residents' health?
Or could it be that you don't really want to know what's going on? Could it be that you're seeking not the truth about Hometown's health but plausible deniability?
Because that's what it's starting to look like.
Unfortunately for us, it does nothing of the sort.
PADOH undertook its latest study of the area after local residents blasted its previous study, released in September 2004, for failing to adequately explore unusual patterns of illnesses associated with environmental pollution. PADOH conducted the first study after learning that three residents of Ben Titus Road in Still Creek just north of Hometown - a community located downhill from the McAdoo Associates Superfund toxic waste site and Northeastern Power Co.'s waste-coal-burning plant and downwind of the Air Products industrial gas facility - were suffering from polycythemia vera. A malignant stem-cell disorder affecting the blood, PV is relatively rare in the United States, with studies finding incidence rates for the condition ranging from 1 in 50,000 to 1 in a million. So its triple appearance in a small rural community understandably set off alarms.
I don't have a copy of the latest PADOH study yet, but Hometown resident Joe Murphy does, and he was kind enough to fax me a few pages. For those of us concerned about the area's environmental health, the report is far from reassuring.
To begin with, PADOH found that the Carbon-Luzerne-Schuylkill county area has elevated incidence rates of 12 cancers compared to the state: melanoma in Carbon; stomach, colorectal, larynx, uterus, thyroid, leukemia and PV in Luzerne; and mouth, colorectal, cervix and uterus in Schuylkill. The study also found a "significantly elevated" incidence of PV in Luzerne County. While PADOH's report downplays environmental pollution's role in these cancers and blames "modifiable risk factors," PV is not associated with diet like colon cancer, or with smoking like lung cancer, or with human papillomavirus like cervical cancer. But the condition is associated with exposure to benzene, one of the many pollutants in the toxic stew that is McAdoo Associates.
Furthermore, despite local residents' request to compare local cancer rates to national rates, PADOH continues to compare local rates to state rates. But Pennsylvania has the fifth-highest cancer rate in the nation. What would happen if PADOH were to compare local rates to the national rate? Dante Picciano of the Tamaqua environmental nonprofit Army for a Clean Environment did just that:
"The U.S. annual incidence rate for cervical cancer is 8.4 cases per 100,000," Picciano writes. "Schuylkill County has 15.2 cases per 100,000. The national average for colon and rectum cancer is 53.1 cases per 100,000. Schuylkill County has 71.5 cases per 100,000.
"DOH reports a total of 354 cases of polycythemia vera throughout the entire state for 2001-2002. Luzerne County has 32 cases (9%) and Schuylkill County had 12 cases (3.4%). In other words, Luzerne and Schuylkill County had 12.4% (44 cases) of polycythemia vera in the state during 2001-2002. If you assume a conservative occurrence rate of 1 case per 50,000 people per year, Luzerne and Schuylkill Counties would need a population of 1,100,000 (22 x 50,000) to be within the normal rate for the state. In fact, Luzerne and Schuylkill Counties have a combined population of approximately 470,000. Thus, polycythemia vera is occurring at about 2.3 times the normal rate in Schuylkill and Luzerne Counties."
PADOH's single-minded focus on cancer also limits the study's usefulness. Even though locals report what seem to be high rates of other autoimmune disorders including Graves' disease and multiple sclerosis, PADOH looked only at cancer. And the study was lazy in its methodology. Faced with the serious concern that something's wrong with a community's health, PADOH didn't bother to send anyone to talk with local residents or even to survey them by mail or phone. PADOH staff simply sat at their desks, crunched some readily available numbers, and drew conclusions utterly disconnected from the reality on the ground.
Hello, PADOH? Too many people in the Hometown area are sick. If you don't believe me, ask the doctors. Ask the pharmacists. Ask the oncologists. There's something wrong there. When are you going to stop fiddling with statistics and do something to help people? In tiny little Still Creek alone, three people are suffering from PV. Doesn't that set off alarm bells for you? And it's not just PV. When my father was dying of kidney cancer in 1998, three other men in that Hometown neighborhood - one next door to my family's house, one four doors away, the other five doors away - also were suffering from kidney cancer. They have all since died. Within a few doors of my family's home, there have been at least two brain cancers, six breast cancers, an intestinal cancer, lung cancer, testicular cancer, three cases of Graves' disease, two Parkinson's disease, one rheumatoid arthritis, and one polymyositis, a rare autoimmune disorder in which the body attacks its own muscles. And have you heard about all the cases of multiple sclerosis in Hometown?
Doesn't all that autoimmune illness in one small, rural community worry you? Don't you want to know what's happening there? Don't you think a door-to-door survey is in order to assess residents' health?
Or could it be that you don't really want to know what's going on? Could it be that you're seeking not the truth about Hometown's health but plausible deniability?
Because that's what it's starting to look like.
posted by Sue Sturgis at
11:40 PM
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