NDCA

Pocono cancer probe reopened due to newspaper

The Times-Tribune

BY DANIEL AXELROD
STAFF WRITER
07/12/2008

TOBYHANNA — State officials investigating if four Pocono Mountain-area teenagers represent a “cluster” of rare bone cancers have reopened their analysis based on a Sunday Times story.

The state Department of Health is “reanalyzing everything based on what we learned from the article,” said spokeswoman Stacy Kriedeman.

Since 2006, doctors have diagnosed osteosarcoma in four children, all 15 or 16, including two Tobyhanna girls, a boy who formerly lived there and a Blakeslee girl who attends school in Tobyhanna.

The Health Department recently completed its statistical analysis of whether the children can be designated a cancer cluster — a larger-than-expected total within a group of people, a geographic area or time period. Parents of the four children were waiting for the results when the newspaper learned this week the state had reopened its analysis.

Bill and Olga Whitman, whose daughter, Sonya, was diagnosed last summer, say the state accidentally excluded their child from the investigation despite the fact that the Whitmans asked for the state inquiry.

While Ms. Kriedeman declined to say whether the state omitted Sonya, the Whitmans said state investigator Gene Weinberg, M.D., called them after the article’s publication and acknowledged their daughter was not in the statistical analysis begun last spring. Efforts to reach Dr. Weinberg were unsuccessful late Friday.

Citing health confidentiality laws, Ms. Kriedeman declined to provide the names of the children in the investigation or the targeted towns. She said, “We felt it was necessary to expand the area beyond our original analysis” of nine ZIP codes in and around Tobyhanna to include cancer cases in 12 ZIP codes.

The state is not just examining the osteosarcoma cases, but looking into all incidences of cancer in that area, Ms. Kriedeman said. She could not say when the new investigation will end.

In such inquiries, officials in the Health Department’s Bureau of Epidemiology review the number of recent rare cancer cases in an area. That figure is compared with incidences between 1981 and 2005, the earliest and latest years recorded in the state’s cancer registry. If a strange pattern is detected and not considered a fluke, investigators might test water, soil and air for cancer-causing agents.

For her part, Mrs. Whitman is not confident in the state’s monitoring of the situation, because in the past investigators haven’t used the most current information.

“It just seems so unreal to me that (state investigators) don’t understand their accuracy depends on the data they have,” Mrs. Whitman said. They “should be more=2 0up-to-date with their data before they make such a report.”

Meanwhile, three of the four children are in remission including Sonya, Thomas Abramouski, 16, now of Moscow, and Nakia Irving, 16, of Blakeslee. Alexandria “Xandi” Robbins, 15, died in September at her Tobyhanna home.

“All we want is the public to be aware and the officials to be pushed to identify what the problem is that’s” causing the cancer, said Lori Abramouski, Thomas’ mother.

Contact the writer: daxelrod@timesshamrock.com


©The Times-Tribune 2008


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Frank Waksmunski
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