Cancer victims' families blame Bayshore
By FRANK GLUCK
frank.gluck@heraldtribune.com
BRADENTON -- Terri Lumsden Jewell, a Bayshore High School graduate, received the worst possible news after a routine blood test in 1999.
The nasty bruise on her leg was not from a run-in with a car door, but a symptom of late-stage chronic myelogenous leukemia.
Jewell, 37, a mother of two, died six months later from the rare form of cancer that strikes one or two people for every 100,000. For years, her family considered it a horrible but random tragedy.
Now Jewell's sister, Cheryl Jozsa, and 30 other families of alumni and former employees from the Manatee County high school are not so sure it was random.
They believe diesel fuel tanks buried on the school grounds may be the cause of dozens of rare cancers. The cancers have struck young and seemingly healthy Bayshore alumni.
The group's claims have drawn the attention of state Rep. Bill Galvano.
Group members are talking about filing a class-action lawsuit to seek financial damages and get answers to their agonizing medical mysteries.
They face a huge challenge in proving a link between the school and the deaths, however.
Diesel fuel tanks buried near the old school building, which closed in 1998 after the new facility opened just south of it on the same property, contained cancer-causing chemicals. But a series of tests showed no dangerous levels of contamination in either the soil or the ground water before the tanks were removed.
Furthermore, the Florida Department of Health determined in February that the school, which had documented mold and air quality problems, posed no cancer risk.
"We haven't been able to find anything in the records that would indicate a problem," said Forrest Branscomb, risk manager for the Manatee school district. "There's no risk."
Health officials say bona fide "cancer clusters" -- where high cancer rates appear in specific populations -- are extremely rare. In most cases, the illnesses are shown to be nothing more than statistical anomalies, they say.
Still, the Bayshore families are not convinced.
"We have so many alumni dying from rare and aggressive cancers," said Jozsa. "In 90 percent of these cases, there's no family history at all. It's just real scary."
Suspicion develops and then spreads
Jozsa, herself a 1981 Bayshore graduate, became suspicious in 2003 when she received a call from a friend about another Bayshore graduate who had developed acute myelogenous leukemia, a rare cancer that is similar to the one that killed Jozsa's sister.
One of that cancer's risk factors is benzene, which is found in diesel fuel.
Jozsa heard about the Bayshore diesel tank, then found out about the benzene-cancer link, and began to wonder if other Bayshore grads had gotten sick.
She set up a Web site to allow Bayshore alumni to connect and chronicle the illnesses. So far, more than 300 people have contacted her, she said.
They have counted 63 cancer cases among alumni and former staff of the old school. Another 20 report their children had birth defects.
Lana Johnson's husband, Zaharius, died in November from colon cancer at the age of 27, much younger than most colon cancer patients.
Zaharius Johnson, a 1997 Bayshore graduate, was a standout defensive back on the school's football team and later played for the University of Arizona.
Since colon cancer is usually attributed to lifestyle factors such as poor diet and inactivity, Johnson believes her husband's death is suspicious. She wants more environmental testing on the school grounds.
"There's just a lot of freaky things that have happened," said Johnson, who lives in Arizona. "We just want someone unbiased to look into this."
Liz Reed of Bradenton also wants testing, but she is unsure if anything will come of it.
Her son, Rick Speed, was 18 when he died in 1997 from Ewing's sarcoma, a rare bone disease. He attended Bayshore in 1993 and 1994.
"As much as I want answers, I don't know if I'll get them," Reed said. "It's just strange -- no one in the family has had cancer and, boom, he's diagnosed with cancer. And a rare cancer at that."
Acceptable contamination, or hazards in the soil?
Those convinced the old school is causing the illnesses primarily point to the two diesel fuel tanks once buried yards from the building.
In the mid-1990s, the school had a problem with a 10,000-gallon cylinder buried south of the old high school building. Officials worried the tank, which was nearly full, was leaking.
"The potential for a major pollution cleanup is great because of the age and size of this tank," one 1995 school memo stated.
The tank was not removed for another seven months. Palmetto-based environmental cleanup firm Enviro-Audit & Compliance then tested the soil and ground water for contamination.
The company reported diesel contamination of 20 parts per million in one sample, and 7 parts per million in another. The state's standard for dangerous contamination is 50 parts per million.
No diesel compounds were found in the ground water, the report shows. Furthermore, the school drinking water was piped in from the county.
A follow-up survey in 2001 determined there were no potable water wells within a quarter-mile of the school.
Workers in 1989 also removed a 350-gallon diesel fuel tank near the old parking lot. They discovered only trace amounts of diesel-related chemicals in the surrounding soil.
An environmental report conducted after the removal found no need for chemical cleanup. School district officials say that proves the tanks were no threat.
Orlando attorney Michael Moore, who was hired by Jozsa and the other families to organize the potential class action lawsuit against the school district, believes those tests prove otherwise.
"There's really no acceptable level of benzene because, over time, it could lead to (health) problems," he said.
True clusters are rare and difficult to prove
Jozsa believes that Bayshore contamination killed her sister. For her, the numbers prove the case.
Take the class of 1980, which Jozsa said had 10 reported cases of cancer, or about 3.2 percent of its 308 total students.
Whether that is considered high depends on how the numbers are crunched.
About a half-percent of Florida's population was found to have cancer in 2005, according to the American Cancer Society.
But the students did not all receive their diagnoses in one given year. Nor do the numbers include other risk factors, such as poor lifestyle choices or possible chemical exposure in other locations.
And, the fact is, cancer is actually quite common, said Beverly Kingsley, an epidemiologist with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
True clusters involve the same illnesses appearing over and over in a population spending time in a given geographic area, Kingsley said.
"Generally, what epidemiologists like to see before they jump in with an investigation is one type of cancer," she said. "That is the best shot we have of proving something."
Even then, less than 1 percent of cancer cluster investigations ever prove an environmental link, she said. The CDC receives roughly 200 reports of suspected clusters every year.
Jozsa is not swayed.
"I find it hard to believe these are all bad lightning strikes," she said. "If these are all coincidences, then we should all pool together and play the lottery."
Larry Simmons, who was on the school board when the old Bayshore High School building was demolished, said concerns about contamination are unfounded. He sent his own two children to Bayshore between 1984 and 1992.
"You could probably go to half the filling stations in Manatee County, and probably half of them have had a leaking tank," Simmons said. "You could probably show that the people working there had no health problems."
Clusters have been shown in other places, however.
The Florida Department of Health recently concluded that people living and working in the Tallevast area who drank well water before 2004 face elevated health risks. Those residents and workers have a low to moderate chance of developing kidney and liver cancer, leukemia and lymphoma, the health department said.
State Rep. Galvano said he is keeping an open mind.
"It is one of those odd situations when you have people not related who have a common background geographically who believe there is some problem," Galvano said. "I don't want to be an alarmist, but I'm not ready to dismiss it."
This is not good - this is where John went to high school!
