Study of disease clusters urged
Terry on Feb 19th 2011
Bill would give EPA authority to investigate possible causes
2/19/2011
Gannett Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON – Warning flags about carcinogens in the environment have been raised frequently over the past decade, from the 2000 movie “Erin Brockovich” to a 2010 statement by the President’s Cancer Panel saying that the problem has been “grossly underestimated.”
Now, lawmakers are pushing a bill that would strengthen the federal response to clusters of unusually high rates of cancer, birth defects and other diseases in communities across the country.
The legislation, sponsored by Sens. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, would give the Environmental Protection Agency authority to investigate environmental causes of suspected clusters and require the agency to respond within 60 days to local concerns. The EPA would send teams of scientists and officials to affected communities and post findings in a public online database.
Scientists and health activists say the government’s current response to disease clusters ranges from piecemeal to non-existent.
“The federal government has a policy of not stepping in, and the states feel pretty overwhelmed when these problems come to them,” said Terry Nordbrock, executive director of the Disease Clusters Alliance.
Nordbrock’s son, Linus, was diagnosed with leukemia in 2001 at age 2. The family lives in Sierra Vista, where rates of childhood leukemia more than doubled from 1995 to 2005. Linus is now in remission.
Children are more vulnerable to chemical toxins than adults because they have faster metabolisms and less mature immune systems.
Government agencies lack funding to thoroughly research cancer clusters, said Mark Witten, a retired research professor at the University of Arizona’s Institute of the Environment who studied the Sierra Vista cluster.
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