NDCA

08/30/2008
Opinions flow freely at speakout on well testing
Mid-Hudson News Network

POUGHKEEPSIE - Dutchess County residents at a hearing this week argued the two sides of the latest effort to mandate the testing of private wells.
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“Targeted testing is not scientific, it is Russian roulette,” Hopewell Junction resident Nancy Foster said during the speakout session on Thursday. “In our community, we have houses that sit side by side, one with contamination and one without. Unsuspecting homeowners deserve to be protected.”

Foster lives on Creamery Road, near the Hopewell Precision EPA Superfund site where chemicals were dumped several decades ago, contaminating several wells in the area.

The new well-testing bill - approved by the county Legislation but facing a possible veto by County Executive William Steinhaus - would mandate the testing of any private well in the county at the time of property’s sale. The seller would incur the cost of the test, estimated at around $600.

The public hearing was required by county law before Steinhaus can take action on the bill. But Steinhaus wasn’t at the meeting to offer his own comments on the issue, and his absence angered many who attended.

Another Creamery Road resident, Anne Kover, argued that if a similar law had been passed 20 years ago, before the chemical TCE, was found in her well, her teenage son wouldn’t have the neurological disorders from which he suffers.

Her son, Matthew Kover, 18, also spoke at the hearing.

“My mom knows there are some things I can and can’t do,” he said, struggling to get his words out.

“If you pass this bill,” he said, as if speaking to Steinhaus, “there won’t be other kids like me.”

Comments against the bill also were made at the hearing.

“There is no scientific basis for this law. This is not helping those who aren’t selling homes,” said East Fishkill resident Joseph Petinella.

LaGrange resident James Hanson said residents shouldn’t be saying “the sky is falling when it’s not.”

Hanson said science “should be the dictating force here, not emotion, not passion. If we have an issue, then we need to address it.”

Hanson also said that if homeowners are concerned about their wells, they can have them tested on their own.

“I think it’s incumbent upon you, if you have this fear, to take this upon yourselves,” he said. “This is not supposed to be a mandated item.”

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8165024777546661764&pr=goog-sl

Closed plant in Cameron to be checked for contaminants

By ALAN SCHER ZAGIER/The Associated Press

June 27, 2008 | 1:14 a.m. CST

CAMERON — State regulators will examine a shuttered manufacturing plant as a possible source of environmental contaminants that may be behind an outbreak of tumors among northwest Missouri residents.

The Rockwool Industries plant three miles west of town produced fiber insulation before closing more than two decades ago. The city then bought the building and leased it from 1992 to 2003 to Midwest Hanger, a Kansas City coat hanger manufacturer.

State environmental health officials disclosed the plan Thursday night at a community meeting attended by more than 150 worried residents. Local activists have identified 11 area residents afflicted with tumors since 2002.

The number could be much higher. After initially declining to disclose the number of tumor reports submitted, two officials who oversee the state’s cancer registry and its cancer inquiry unit said they have received 20 to 40 reports indicating similar problems from area residents.

They cautioned that those reports are not yet verified. And the state has tracked only benign, nonmalignant brain tumors since 2004, making historical comparisons and causal conclusions difficult.

“We are not going to be able to calculate a rate when we get (complete data) because we don’t have anything to compare it to,” said Jeannette Jackson-Thompson, operations director for the Missouri Cancer Registry.

Among those at the meeting was Billy Kemper, whose 44-year-old wife, Karen, died from complications caused by a tumor-related stroke in May, just one month after her diagnosis.

“She thought she had an inner ear infection,” he said. “She had an MRI, and that’s when they discovered the brain tumor.”

Tests by the Missouri Department of Natural Resources ruled out the city’s water supply as a likely cause.

“Nothing was found in the water above the (acceptable) standard,” said Cheri Baysinger, a Department of Health and Senior Services epidemiologist.

The absence of answers frustrated many audience members, even as state officials pledged their support.

“We’ll do whatever we need to get to the bottom of this,” Jackson-Thompson said.

Environmental tests of the manufacturing site should begin in several weeks, regulators said. Another community meeting will be held once those results are available.

Cameron resident Jim Frasher, whose doctor found a benign tumor about the size of a golf ball on his brain stem in January, compiled a list of 11 area residents — four women and seven men — who found tumors between 2002 and 2008.

Seven of those were identified in the last two years. The victims’ ages range from a 6-year-old boy to the 61-year-old Frasher. All but one of the tumors were found in the brain.

Finding a single cause for the tumors may be particularly difficult because the known cases do not appear to have a common link, such as a workplace or neighborhood. The range of ages and the split between benign and malignant tumors also make it unlikely that a single cause may be found, according to cancer experts.

http://www.communityhealthstudies.org/

We are closer to having a national childhood cancer registry:

June 12, 2008 (Bethesda, MD) - United States House of Representatives
passed H.R. 1553, the “Caroline Pryce Walker Conquer Childhood Cancer
Act,” which promises to significantly increase federal investment
into childhood cancer research.

The bill authorizes $30 million annually over five years, providing
funding for collaborative
pediatric cancer clinical trials research, to create a
population-based national childhood cancer
database, and to further improve public awareness and communication
regarding available
treatments and research for children with cancer and their families.
The bill passed the House by a vote of 416 to 0.

During markup of the legislation, the bill was renamed the Caroline
Pryce Walker Conquer
Childhood Cancer Act of 2008, in memory of Caroline Pryce Walker, daughter of
Congresswoman Deborah Pryce (R-OH), who succumbed to neuroblastoma in
1999 at age nine.

Companion legislation in the United States Senate (S.911), sponsored
by Senator Jack Reed (D-
RI), cleared the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP)
Committee unanimously
in November, 2007. The Senate version of the Conquer Childhood
Cancer Act currently has 63
co-sponsors; a full Senate floor vote on the bill is expected this summer.

Here is a profile of Julie Ross, the Epidemiology Chair for the
Children’s Oncology Group, who has developed a prototype for a
national childhood cancer
registry:http://www.cancer. umn.edu/research /profiles/ ross.html

http://www.thetimes-tribune.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=19847137&BRD=2185&PAG=461&dept_id=415898&rfi=6

Pocono cancer probe reopened due to newspaper

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

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


–
Frank Waksmunski
CARBON COUNTY GROUNDWATER GUARDIANS: http://www.carbonwaters.org/
PENN STATE MASTER WELL OWNER: http://mwon.cas.psu.edu/