Hi everyone!
I wanted to share a news article in our local newspaper. It's about all the recent childhood cancers in the area. Thought you might wanted to read it.
There ARE other people in the area with cancer who didn't want to be named, so that might be a thing to keep in mind.
The Pennsylvania Department of Health has opened an investigation into a cluster of childhood cancers in the Pocono Mountain area.
"We're investigating," said Holly Senior, a department spokesperson, though she added that little else could be said before the research was performed and the results came in. "We don't have anything to report — good, bad or indifferent — at the moment."
A cancer cluster is a greater-than-expected number of cancer cases in a geographic area over a period of time.
Parents of several of the afflicted children brought to the department's attention the existence of at least six cases of cancer that had been diagnosed over 21 months among young teenagers who live, or lived for a substantial period, within a 7-mile radius. Those parents also contacted the Pocono Record and shared news of the department's investigation.
Four of the children have osteosarcoma, which is the most common form of bone cancer. Four in 800,000 children contract osteosarcoma nationwide, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The four cases contracted locally occurred among some 8,300 children, according to Census data for Tunkhannock and Coolbaugh townships that were adjusted to reflect growth.
Another child has brain cancer and still another has a form of leukemia. One of the children has died, while the cancers in two others are in remission.
"I'm sure that what's gotten the attention of the state are the four osteosarcomas," said Dr. Samuel Lesko, medical director and director of research at the Northeast Regional Cancer Institute in Scranton. He is not involved with the state's investigation. "It's the same cancer type, and we are inclined to think there's the same underlying exposure or risk factor."
While osteosarcoma is fairly rare in the general population, it is the sixth most common form of cancer found in children, especially teenagers whose bones are growing rapidly and are therefore more vulnerable to their replicating cells going awry.
"I don't want people to freak out," Lesko said, "but I'm glad that the state is investigating it."
Generally, in investigations of this sort, epidemiologists scan cancer registries and try to collect data from the subjects themselves.
"If they see a similarity, the question becomes, 'What's a common exposure? Did they all go to the same school, use the same playground or drink from the same aquifer?'" said Steven Godin, a health professor at East Stroudsburg University whose specialty is cancer.
While all four children with osteosarcoma spent some time in the Pocono Mountain School District, one had moved frequently and another had been home-schooled since 2001. Two have lived in Pocono Farms East, one each in A Pocono Country Place, Echo Lake, Arrowhead Lake and Stonecrest Park. Some had spent most of their lives in the Poconos, while others had moved here more recently.
Another possibility is that the children, with their weaker immune systems, may reveal the presence of an environmental toxin that is not yet understood, similar to how canaries responded to the presence of poisonous gases in coal mines. "If the canary in the mine shaft draws your attention to something that shouldn't be there, we'll have to deal with that and clean that up," Lesko said.
"If we don't find (a common link), that might reflect our ignorance about exposure," he added. "We don't know everything about potential causes."
At the same time, experts cautioned that the cluster could turn out to be a collection of tragedies that just happened — awfully — to occur randomly and close together, but without a common cause. "When we think of the history of cancer clusters, that's as often the case as not," Lesko said.
Some said the situation on the mountain pointed out the gaps in public health infrastructure locally.
"One of the problems we have in Monroe County is we don't have mandatory testing. We don't know what's in the well water," said Godin of ESU. "We don't have the infrastructure to say there may be illegal dumping going on. We don't know until it's too late."
Efforts have been launched in the past to start a public health department on the county level.
"We're very vulnerable to things," said Barbara Herting, a retired pediatric nurse who has been leading the charge to start a health department in Monroe County. "My heart really goes out to those families. The state health department can only do so much."
Monroe County Commissioner Chairwoman Suzanne McCool reportedly has reached out to Pike, Carbon and Wayne counties to see if there was interest in starting a regional health department.
"You'd have people on top of this right away," Godin said of such a department. "Having that infrastructure would lead people to come forward and say what they've seen or what they know."
The Pennsylvania Department of Health's investigation is expected to take several months.
"The encouragement I'd give to the community is to cooperate with the state, but don't expect an immediate answer tomorrow and to find a smoking gun, so to speak," Lesko said. "Unfortunately, that often does not happen."
That sense of closure is what some parents crave, however. "We don't want to see anyone else get sick," said Lori Abramouski, whose son, Thomas, has survived a bout with osteosarcoma. "If there's something out there causing this, I want it to be addressed."
GAGWTA! Sonya.
)
Since mine isn't umcomfortable, I'm not really concerned about it.
