Residents Say Cluster Exists; Officials Disagree

By KIM CAROLLO, ABC News Medical Unit
Aug. 25, 2010

Stacey and John Quartarone of Carlsbad, Calif., lost son Chase, 16, to non-Hodgkins lymphoma in December.

A dying wish was for his parents to find out what caused his cancer.

“He said, ‘Please don’t let anybody else get this,’” mom Stacey Quartarone said.

The Quartarones are doing their best to honor their son’s wish. They’ve done their research and have discovered others in Carlsbad who said they have cancer or whose family members developed it.

But what started as a quest to determine Chase’s cause of death led them to what they believe is a so-called cancer cluster around Kelly Elementary School, which their son had attended.

“There were at least 15 confirmed cases of cancer in the last 15 years,” Stacey Quartarone said. “We’re positive that at least eight teachers have had different types of cancer in the last 10 years.”

The Quartarones and others who believe something environmental is behind what they describe as an abnormally high number of cancer cases in Carlsbad pushed the school district earlier this year to perform soil testing.

“They went ahead and did two tests, and they came back negative,” she said. “But they didn’t test the soil, just playground sand.”

Quartarone said two private companies hired by the school district tested the sand in a playground at Kelly Elementary School and another site. No one, she said, has revealed where the other site is or exactly what was tested.

The school district has yet to approve additional soil testing, she said.

“It’s an issue of funding, and they feel the previous tests proved that everything is fine,” she said.

But, she added, the district said it would take up the issue again if community members agreed to pay for the soil testing.

Carlsbad School District board of education president Mark Tanner said the city’s schools are safe.

“The Board believes we have carefully and thoroughly evaluated the facts surrounding the safety of our schools,” he said. “Multiple independent data indicate they are very safe environments wherein Carlsbad Unified students are educated and employees work.”

Tests of the air surrounding Kelly Elementary School are underway, and results should be available in September or October, according to the San Diego County Department of Health.

Existence of Clusters Difficult to Prove

Quartarone said a number of children developed rare cancers, which is more proof that there could be cancer-causing agents in the environment.

According to information on the San Diego County Department of Health’s website, however, the number of cases of leiomyosarcoma, one of those rare cancers, was not abnormal for the area surrounding Kelly Elementary School. Specific data for the particular area aren’t available. John Quartarone said that there were also cases of thyroid cancer and bone cancer.

Epidemiologists say that statistics make it difficult to prove that cancer clusters actually exist.

“What health departments do is look at statistics and determine whether there is a higher incidence in a region,” said Regina Santella, professor of environmental health sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health of Columbia University in New York.

“If it seems higher, that still doesn’t mean there is some particular cause. It could be a statistical fluke.”

Thomas Burke, professor and associate dean of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, said, “Some people are much more susceptible to cancer, and there’s an interaction between the environment and genetics that can contribute to cancer.

“Sometimes, we see very elevated numbers but it will be a small population. So it’s sometimes due to chance.”

And even if there is no cluster, he added, it’s sometimes important to run tests to determine if there is something in the environment that could be affecting the community’s health.

John Quartarone said that about 440 people who either live in Carlsbad or lived there once before contacted him on his web site and told him they had developed cancer over the past 10 years.

Data from the California Cancer Registry show that between 1998 and 2008, the last year for which data are available, San Diego County had an age-adjusted cancer incidence rate of 511 cases per 100,000 people. Before adjusting for age, the rate was about 468 cases per 100,000 people. State rates are 478 and 434, respectively. Carlsbad has a population of roughly 100,000 people.

City officials said that study results from 2007 and 2008 showed no elevated rate of cancer in Carlsbad. They said that a more recent study done in response to concerns by city residents also showed no evidence of a cancer cluster in the city.

Despite the data, Quartarone has no plans to give up his fight to find out what’s causing cancer in Carlsbad.

In addition to Kelly Elementary School, the Quartarones want tests on the the ball fields where some of the children who developed cancer played together.

“I’m going to continue to pursue what I think is necessary for the schools to be safe,” he said. “My son asked me to do something and I have to complete it.”

Copyright © 2010 ABC News Internet Ventures

online article with video.

Columnist Logan Jenkins

By Logan Jenkins, San Diego Union-Tribute

Sunday, July 4, 2010 at 9 p.m.

Three years ago, my sister died in a cancer cluster.

Or so she and her fellow teachers believed like an article of faith.

As it almost invariably does, the California Cancer Registry debunked the plague that gave my sister’s terminal illness meaning beyond herself.

If she died from something evil in the ground, air or water, my sister would be transformed into an innocent canary in a coal mine, not a loser in a lottery of random chance. Her long illness, if dramatic environmental causes could be found, could save others from the same fate.

As in the vast majority of reported clusters — and there are hundreds, if not thousands, every year — state epidemiologists concluded that statistical chance caused the appearance of a cancer cluster at La Quinta Middle School.

At last count, some 18 La Quinta Middle School employees contracted cancer over a 15-year period. More than a dozen former students have been diagnosed.

In the past few years, my sister’s colleagues have retired or transferred. To those burdened by memory, it remains a sick school, a Love Canal with classrooms that the state would never acknowledge.

The prohibitive odds are that the cancer cluster around Carlsbad’s Kelly Elementary School will, in time, also fade from the news pages.

The harsh truth is that cancer occurs often and for any number of complex reasons. Finding a specific cause, a carcinogenic smoking gun, is terribly rare.

…

“Don’t let anyone suffer the way I have.”

Those were among the last words of a 16-year-old Carlsbad boy to his stricken parents.

In the last six months, Stacey and John Quartarone have dedicated themselves to find out if Chase, who passed away last December of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, died because he was exposed to something toxic in his neighborhood.

“My mantra, my life, my goal is to be true to his request,” John told me.

A grieving father can’t discover a cure for cancer, but the retired librarian has collected information like a Nobel Prize winner. He’s turned the mining of ominous data into a part-time job, growing Chase’s death into a well-publicized cluster, pressuring public health officials to hold packed meetings, pressing politicians to take notice of the ominously high numbers of cancer victims.

John Quartarone doesn’t know exactly where the evil lurks — in the nearby Encina power plant? the Agua Hedionda Lagoon? the pesticide-rich farmland upon which houses have been built? — but he won’t rest until every test has been conducted, every environmental factor ruled out.

“When the scientists report that everything is standard, I’ll be content,” he told me.

Until then, he’ll push for expensive tests. Local politicians like Supervisor Bill Horn and Rep. Brian Bilbray, R-Solana Beach, both facing re-election, have heard the call.

…

In his story on the most recent public meeting in Carlsbad, Union-Tribune reporter Keith Darcé quoted a UCSD psychology professor suggesting that the belief in cancer clusters is often a result of the human refusal to believe that a loved one died from chance, from an inexplicable act of God, if you will.

“It’s hugely comforting to think that the world doesn’t just strike people down, especially innocent children,” Nicholas Christenfeld said.

There is, however, another way to view clusters that does not patronize believers as either mathematically dense or psychologically bewildered.

In a sense, I’m living in a cancer cluster. You are, too.

It is undeniable that the whole country is one gargantuan cancer cluster. Think about it. Almost half of us will contract the disease before we die. If that’s not a cluster, what is?

Examined from 30,000 feet, the Earth’s atmosphere is polluted. The ocean is full of metals. Processed food? You know it’s a horror story. Not to mention cigarettes, alcohol. And now we learn that cell phones could be microwaving our brains.

I could go on, but you know all this as well as I do.

In the infinite goodness of his heart, Chase asked too much of his parents. There are no perfectly safe zones. There’s no catcher in the pesticide-laced rye.

Even in a dark coal mine, however, it’s the nature of canaries to sing and fly toward the sky.

There’s a healthy garden underneath the global oil spill if only we can muster the will to scrub it clean and keep it well-lighted.

Before he died, Chase was on the verge of making Eagle Scout. His final project, which he did not live to complete, was a quiet sanctuary at his beloved Kelly Elementary School, ground zero in the suspected Carlsbad cancer cluster.

Chase’s idea was to create a place where a black Lab, an unflappable and very patient therapy dog called Rosie, would be on duty to listen to students read out loud.

The project is just about finished, thanks to Chase’s family, volunteers and local businesses that donated materials.

Rosie’s Garden will not save children from cancer, but it’s good for the heart.

Logan Jenkins: (760) 752-6756; logan.jenkins@uniontrib.com
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BY BRUCE LIEBERMAN, UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
THURSDAY, APRIL 29, 2010 AT 12:04 A.M.

Frustrated parents appealed to public health and environmental officials at a forum Wednesday night to do something about what they perceive to be a cancer cluster in Carlsbad.

The county-sponsored public forum drew strong emotions from people calling for answers.

“We want to know what you’re going to do for our town — our soil, our water, our air,” said Stacey Quartarone, a Carlsbad resident whose son, Chase, died in December from large B-cell non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. “I can prove to you there’s a cluster here. We’re scared.”

Thomas Mack, a professor at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine and a state cancer expert, presented statistics during a presentation that lasted more than an hour — in the end showing data that he said show that cancer rates appear no higher in Carlsbad than across the rest of the county.

Parents, impatient during Mack’s talk on basic cancer epidemiology, said his data were out of date and didn’t account for a rash of cancer cases since 2007.

Wilma Wooten, the county’s public health officer, said more current data are needed to make a full assessment of what’s happening in Carlsbad.

“That is the next step, and we have to do that in a reasonable amount of time,” Wooten said.

Wooten said the county has posted a Web page that will allow people to enter information on the incidents of cancer they know of, and that the county is forming a task force to collect information.

Several parents said they specifically wanted soil testing conducted at Kelly Elementary School.

The National Cancer Institute defines a disease cluster as “the occurrence of a greater-than-expected number of cases of a particular disease within a group of people, a geographic area or a period of time.”

Cancer clusters can be suspected when people report that several family members, friends, neighbors or co-workers have been diagnosed with the same or related cancer or cancers.

In addition to Mack’s assessment Wednesday, two previous cancer studies in 2007 and 2008 did not find any unusual number or distribution of cases in Carlsbad.

Fifty percent of men and one in three women will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetimes, according to the state’s Public Health Department. That means that out of a randomly selected group of 60 Californians, 25 will be diagnosed with cancer at some point.

Nevertheless, several cases of cancer in recent years in Carlsbad have alarmed parents and others.

John Quartarone, Stacey Quartarone’s husband, has said he believes his son’s illness was triggered by something in the air, water or soil in the city east of Agua Hedionda Lagoon.

The area around Agua Hedionda Lagoon was farmed extensively during the second half of the last century, and some farms are still operating.

The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society has claimed that the causes of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma are largely unknown, but the rate is higher in farm communities — possibly caused by pesticides.

John Quartarone said he has compiled a list of 265 cancer cases linked to the area of Carlsbad where his family lives, near Agua Hedionda Lagoon.

“There’s definitely a pattern here,” he said.

Bruce Lieberman: (760) 476-8205; bruce.lieberman@uniontrib.com

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Environmental Impact Report for refinery expansion ruled inadequate

Richmond, April 26, 2010 — In an unprecedented victory for the community, the California State Court of Appeals has upheld the majority of findings in a lower court decision that the Environmental Impact Report (EIR) for the expansion of the Chevron Corporation’s refinery in Richmond California violated state environmental law. The Community members have been campaigning to fight the proposed switch to refining dirtier, heavier oil for several years.

“This decision is a significant victory for environmental justice in the city of Richmond and beyond,” said Dr. Henry Clark, executive director of West County Toxics Coalition. ?African American, Latino and Asian communities near the refinery have borne a disproportionate burden of exposure to pollution from the refinery for decades. And the community has been fighting back for decades – this victory is huge.?

“The court agrees that the people of Richmond have a right to know just how dirty the crude oil processed in this refinery will be,” said Earthjustice attorney Will Rostov. “The court pointed out the legal deficiencies in Chevron’s refinery expansion plan and tells Chevron the simple steps it needs to expand their refinery in a legal way that won’t harm the neighbors.”

Environmental justice groups Communities for a Better Environment (CBE), Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN), and West County Toxics Coalition (WCTC), represented by Earthjustice, had sued the City of Richmond over its approval of the refinery expansion in 2008, on the basis that the inadequacies in the EIR rendered approval illegal under the California Environmental Quality Act. Last year, a California Superior Court in Contra Costa County agreed, tossing out that EIR and issuing an injunction preventing further work on the refinery expansion.

?In this difficult economic climate, Chevron has used jobs to hold our communities hostage,? said James Walker, member of Service Employees International Union Local 1021 and local city equipment services worker. ?As a Richmond resident and union worker, I shouldn’t have to choose between jobs and my family’s health. Times are tough. We’re all struggling to pay bills and put food on the table. It’s time for Chevron to come to the table and negotiate an agreement that protects community health and gets people back to work.?

The appellate court found today that the EIR should have addressed changes in the grade of crude oil the refinery would process after the expansion. The expansion project would increase the refinery’s ability to process dirtier grades of crude oil according to experts hired by the community, the State Attorney General’s office and the trade unions, all of whom independently reviewed Chevron’s proposed plans.

The groups charge that the refinery would likely emit significantly more toxic pollution if

it begins refining dirtier crude. This pollution would include chemicals linked to cancer and respiratory ailments, according to the groups’ expert. The EPA reported nearly 100,000 pounds of toxic waste from the site in 2007, including more than 4,000 pounds of benzene (a known human carcinogen) and 455,000 pounds of ammonia, repeated exposure to which can cause an asthma-like illness and lead to lung damage.

“This is a good decision,” said Socorro Garcia, a ten-year Richmond resident and neighbor of the refinery. “There are people like me living very close to the refinery. The refinery has damaged our health and our community. Our health is our future.”

In a precedent-setting decision on one issue, the Court also found fault with the EIR for failing to include specific and proven plans to mitigate a projected increase in greenhouse gas emissions from the expansion and for allowing Chevron itself (not the City) to come up with a mitigation plan later, outside the publicly involved CEQA process. The Chevron Richmond refinery is the single largest source of greenhouse gas pollution in the state, according to data released by the California Air Resources Board in 2009. The EIR indicated that the expansion could generate almost 900,000 tons of additional greenhouse gases.

?It’s a double whammy,” said Sandy Saeteurn, Lead Organizer with APEN and a Richmond resident. “Chevron is hurting Richmond residents like my family with its toxic pollution and hurting the planet with its greenhouse gases. I grew up in Richmond doing Chevron refinery accident drills instead of fire drills. I don’t want my 9-yr old son Nicky to keep doing the same. Accurate public information about the proposed refinery expansion will allow better decisions for protecting our environmental and economic health.?

Chevron’s plan to expand the Richmond refinery — allowing the facility to refine heavier crude oil than it can now process — could significantly increase the facility’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to CBE scientist Greg Karras. “Refineries that have begun the switch to heavier, dirtier crude oil emit up to 58 percent more greenhouse gases per barrel refined as compared with the average U.S. refinery,” said Karras.

“Asthma rates in Richmond are already twice the national average,” said Richmond resident Kay Wallis, a health educator with the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at UCSF. “For decades, Richmond families have paid a steep price for living near Chevron’s refinery. Now there’s evidence that the impact of Chevron’s pollution extends well beyond our beleaguered local neighborhoods – the damage is worldwide.”

“Richmond doesn’t need dirtier crude,” said Greg Karras. “Now we can move onto the task of creating healthy, green jobs that put people to work weatherizing buildings, expanding public transit, and moving Richmond toward economic and climate sustainability. Chevron could be a leader in this change. It can’t continue with business as usual — not for long.”

Subject: Hazardous emissions from refineries are not reported

By RAMIT PLUSHNICK-MASTI (AP) 4-23-10

HOUSTON — The nation’s oil and chemical plants are spewing a lot more pollution than they report to the Environmental Protection Agency — and the EPA knows it.

But the federal agency has yet to adopt more accurate, higher-tech measuring methods that have been available for years.

Significant changes will not be seen for at least two more years, even though an internal EPA watchdog called for improvements in 2006 and some of the more sophisticated measuring devices have been used in Europe since the 1990s.

Records, scientific studies and interviews by The Associated Press suggest pollution from petrochemical plants is at least 10 times greater than what is reported to the government and the public.

Some European countries employ lasers, solar technology and remote sensors to measure air pollution, while the U.S. relies to a large degree on estimates derived from readings taken by plant employees using hand-held “sniffer” devices that check for leaks in pumps and valves.

The failure to get a true assessment of industrial emissions hinders attempts to monitor and regulate public health and air quality. And the problem is seen as especially urgent in oil centers such as Houston, where plants line the city’s Ship Channel and nearby residents are ordered to stay inside many times each year for their own safety when the plants belch high levels of toxic substances such as benzene.

“Emissions, we do believe, have been underestimated in general,” a top EPA air quality official, Peter Tsirigotis, acknowledged recently. Asked why it has taken so long to modernize the measuring methods, he said: “That, I don’t know.”

Although U.S. oil and chemical companies have criticized some of the high-tech measuring devices, complaining they do not yield a full and accurate picture, industry representatives say they will embrace technologies that work and are affordable.

Under the federal Clean Air Act, plants must bear the cost of pollution-monitoring equipment. And the newer, high-tech devices could easily run a plant hundreds of thousands of dollars. Also, more accurate measuring devices could lead to bigger fines against industrial polluters and force them to pay for cleaner technology.

John Bosch, a chemical engineer who retired from the EPA last year, attributed the delays to the oil and gas industry’s lobbying muscle and resistance to change inside the EPA.

“They have to update the way they do this, but there are many forces against that, political and economic,” he said.

The EPA has known for at least a decade that its pollution measuring methods are suspect. In 2000, government-funded studies in Houston showed true emissions from plants were higher than reported.

And in 2006, the EPA inspector general, an independent oversight office, concluded that the scientific formulas used to calculate plant emissions were outdated, resulting in “significantly underestimated” pollution in the petroleum industry, wood products and ethanol production.

The report said the problem “has hampered environmental decisions, resulting in more than one million tons of uncontrolled emissions spanning years, and an increased risk of adverse health effects.”

“The air might not be as clean as the agency claims,” the report concluded.

Top EPA administrators promised the agency would update the “inherently uncertain and imperfect” scientific formulas and employ better technology to measure emissions.

But four years later, the goal of overhauling the science is at least two years off, and officials cannot say when — or even if — higher-tech measuring systems will be made mandatory.

Every state has at least one chemical plant, and all but 15 states have oil refineries. States such as Texas, Louisiana and California have more than a dozen petrochemical plants each. The EPA, under the Clean Air Act, has required plants since the early 1970s to measure emissions.

But Neil Carman, a chemist with Sierra Club who spent years inspecting industrial plants for Texas’ environmental agency, likens the system to “a police officer or trooper showing up on a highway every three months for 10 seconds. It’s a joke.”

“The numbers are erroneous,” he said.

Two state- and federally funded studies obtained by the AP found vast discrepancies in 2006 between reported emissions and pollution measured with high-tech systems in the Houston area, the heart of the Gulf Coast region that refines one-third of the country’s gasoline.

In the refinery town of Texas City, the high-tech equipment detected levels of smog-causing ethene — an odorless, flammable hydrocarbon — that were 12 times higher than those recorded by EPA-approved methods. In the Houston Ship Channel and in Baytown, ethene levels were 12 1/2 times greater than reported to the EPA.

One of the mobile laser devices now in use in Europe costs about $500,000 on average; another model about half that.

EPA officials are uncertain whether the European technology will be adopted here. They share a concern expressed by industry groups that the equipment generally captures pollution over several weeks and cannot be used to fairly estimate annual pollution.

The solution, Tsirigotis said, may be to use a combination of measuring methods. “There’s no silver bullet here,” he said.

Karin Ritter, an air quality expert at the 400-member American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry’s chief lobbying group, said more research is needed.

“Let’s wait and see what technology is the one to rise to the top,” Ritter said.

Other experts say the technologies have proved their effectiveness and should be used by the EPA.

The industries are arguing “you were here on a bad day. So when is a good day? Tell me when, and I’ll come on a good day,” said Alex Cuclis, a scientist at the Houston Advanced Research Center.

One Houston company that uses high-tech measuring systems, Texas Petrochemicals, has managed to cut emissions of butadiene, a toxic chemical used in synthetic rubber, by at least 75 percent, said Marise Textor, director of regulatory affairs.

“We see things very quickly that we would not have seen historically,” she said.

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By Louis Sahagun
LA Times

Reporting from Kettleman City, Calif.
On a rainy afternoon in a cramped trailer, the five homemakers listened as state officials with clipboards asked personal questions: Did they or their husbands smoke, drink or take illicit drugs? Had they been exposed to pesticides or other toxic substances in the United States or Mexico? Do their families have histories of birth defects?

Each had miscarried a fetus or given birth to a child with severe birth defects within the last three years. Each suspected it had something to do with a nearby toxic waste facility.

“You want to know if we ever smoked cigarettes or took drugs,” Maura Alatorre said bitterly. “But I’m telling you that if the dump is allowed to expand, we’ll suffer more damage and illness. Why? Because we are poor and Hispanic. The people who issue those permits don’t care about us getting sick from it because all they think about is money.”
full article and online video

Jill U. Adams
The Los Angeles Times

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has ordered state health and environmental agencies to continue to investigate a rash of birth defects that occurred in the small San Joaquin Valley town of Kettleman City.

Five of 20 babies born in Kettleman City over a 14-month period had cleft lips or cleft palates, an unusually high rate compared with what’s considered normal. Worldwide, cleft deformities occur in about 1 in every 700 live births, according to a November study in the journal the Lancet.

Residents suspect a nearby toxic waste dump is to blame, although it’s only one of many potential causes.

Smoking, nutrient-poor diets and use of certain medicines by pregnant women have been linked to cleft deformities, as have environmental exposures such as pesticides, organic solvents used in industry and infectious diseases.

A high rate of disease within a specific locale, as is the case in Kettleman City, is called a cluster. Here’s a look at what’s known about disease clusters and how scientists go about determining cause and effect.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines a cluster as “an unusual aggregation, real or perceived, of health events that are grouped together in time and space and that is reported to a public health department.”

Sometimes clusters happen just by chance. Disease rates, after all, are averages, but the cases aren’t distributed perfectly evenly: Within a large population there will be subgroups with higher and lower rates. “It’s like flipping a coin,” says Daniel Wartenberg, an epidemiologist at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in Piscataway, N.J. Getting five heads in a row doesn’t mean the coin isn’t fair — and in the same way, a local cluster of some disease does not automatically mean there is an environmental cause.

Certain kinds of clusters are more easily pinned to a cause than others. Examples are clusters that involve infectious disease — such as outbreaks of illness from food contamination or the 1976 outbreak of pneumonia at an American Legion convention in a Philadelphia hotel, an infection now known as Legionnaires’ disease.

In addition, diseases resulting from workplace exposures or from adverse drug effects are often solved because it’s easier to figure out what everyone in the cluster had in common.

There are also some rare instances in which scientists can link an environmental factor in a community to a very specific disease.

For example, a 2002 study published in Toxicology Letters linked a cluster of lung cancer cases in Turkey to asbestos-containing rocks in the area, with which people built their homes.

A 1997 study, published in the journal Environmental Research, found a similar cause for a lung cancer cluster in Manville, N.J., home to the largest asbestos manufacturing plant in the U.S. People who lived in town (but had never worked at the plant) had 10 times the rate of lung cancer as residents living outside the town. Key to unraveling the mystery was the fact that the type of lung cancer involved was mesothelioma, which is a very specific and known outcome of asbestos exposure, says Dr. Beate Ritz, professor of epidemiology and environmental health at the UCLA School of Public Health.

Cluster investigations work well when you have a cause and an effect within a very short period of time, Ritz says. But more often, they are fraught with uncertainty. They’re extremely difficult with diseases that take years to develop or when many different factors can contribute to a disease. For cancers other than mesothelioma, “it’s almost hopeless,” Ritz says.

Birth defects are similarly difficult because there are so many things that might cause them.

No one disputes that the rate of birth defects in Kettleman City is higher than usual. Many doubt that they will find the cause, though.

“By the time [babies] are born, the toxin may have left the mom and never be shown,” Ritz says. “And in areas where clusters happen, there’s usually more than one thing happening: a toxic waste site, constant pesticide spraying.”

And, says Wartenberg, “we know some of the things that cause clefts, but we don’t know that much.”

Moreover, he adds, “even when the numbers are improbable, that doesn’t mean they’re impossible by chance.”

A preliminary investigation by the California Department of Public Health compared rates of birth defects in Kettleman City with those in neighboring towns for the years 1987 to 2008 and found no evidence of a common cause. The investigation will continue, says Dr. Rick Kreutzer, chief of environmental and occupational disease control at the state agency.

health@latimes.com
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School Principal Leon Muhammad shows NDCA science advisor Zoe Kelman the superfund site next to the playground.

NDCA representatives visited the Bayview neighborhood in South San Francisco last week, receiving a tour of the area affected by the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard superfund site. The community has several specific requests:

1. The Navy should clean up the remaining contaminated sites, and not just cap them.

This is especially important given the risk that an earthquake will cause the harbor fill under the superfund site to dissolve in a process known as liquefaction Unsteady Ground: Lennar, liquefaction and other related meltdownsSF Bay Guardian, 12/31/2008.

2. Construction should be stopped until it is shown that the clean-up will be conducted in a manner that ensures the safety of the schoolchildren and nearby residents.

3. Health testing and bio-monitoring should be conducted to assess if the children and residents have already suffered health impacts from this site.

4. Homes and schools should be tested for contamination associated with the superfund site.

5. Long term health monitoring should be provided to the community because some associated health effects can have long latency periods before the onset of disease.

Other Resources

ARC Ecology’s “Community Window on the Hunters Point Shipyard” with multiple maps, descriptions of contaminants found on various parcels, and links to clean-up documents.

EPA page on Hunter’s Point

Greenaction’s page on Hunters Point

Beyond Toxic: Pollution in Bayview Hunters Point photo journal page.

Too many electromagnetic fields surrounding us–from cell phones, wifi, and commonplace modern technology–may be seriously harming our health. Here’s how to minimize your exposure.

By Michael Segell
Prevention Magazine

The California Cluster

IN 1990, the city of La Quinta, CA, proudly opened the doors of its sparkling new middle school. Gayle Cohen, then a sixth-grade teacher, recalls the sense of excitement everyone felt: “We had been in temporary facilities for 2 years, and the change was exhilarating.” But the glow soon dimmed. One teacher developed vague symptoms– weakness, dizziness–and didn’t return after the Christmas break. A couple of years later, another developed cancer and died; the teacher who took over his classroom was later diagnosed with throat cancer. More instructors continued to fall ill, and then, in 2003, on her 50th birthday, Cohen received her own bad news: breast cancer. “That’s when I sat down with another teacher, and we remarked on all the cancers we’d seen,” she says. “We immediately thought of a dozen colleagues who had either gotten sick or passed away.” By 2005, 16 staffers among the 137 who’d worked at the new school had been diagnosed with 18 cancers, a ratio nearly 3 times the expected number. Nor were the children spared: About a dozen cancers have been detected so far among former students. A couple of them have died.

Prior to undergoing her first chemotherapy treatment, Cohen approached the school principal, who eventually went to district officials for an investigation. A local newspaper article about the possible disease cluster caught the attention of Sam Milham, MD, a widely traveled epidemiologist who has investigated hundreds of environmental and occupational illnesses and published dozens of peer-reviewed papers on his findings. For the past 30 years, he has trained much of his focus on the potential hazards of electromagnetic fields (EMFs)–the radiation that surrounds all electrical appliances and devices, power lines, and home wiring and is emitted by communications devices, including cell phones and radio, TV, and WiFi transmitters. His work has led him, along with an increasingly alarmed army of international scientists, to a controversial conclusion: The “electrosmog” that first began developing with the rollout of the electrical grid a century ago and now envelops every inhabitant of Earth is responsible for many of the diseases that impair–or kill–us.

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Some residents of the impoverished town wonder if a nearby
hazardous waste facility is to blame.

By Louis Sahagun

December 8, 2009

Reporting from Kettleman City, Calif.

When environmental activists began a survey of birth defects in this small migrant farming town halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, the results were alarming.

Approximately 20 babies were born here during the 14 months beginning in September 2007. Three of them died; each had been born with oral deformities known as clefts. Two others born with the defect during that period are undergoing medical treatment.

The 1,500 primarily Spanish-speaking residents of this impoverished enclave just off Interstate 5 want to know what is causing these health problems. Some blame them on a nearby hazardous waste facility — the largest landfill of its kind west of Louisiana and the only one in California licensed to accept carcinogenic PCBs.

Residents and environmental activists want the Kings County Board of Supervisors to stop a proposed expansion of the 1,600-acre landfill until the issue can be investigated by state and federal regulatory agencies. Even Chemical Waste Management Inc., which owns the site, has also expressed concerns about the county’s reluctance to call for an outside investigation.

County health officials say it is extremely difficult to quantify the relationship between pollution and birth defects.

“I understand why people are concerned,” Kings County health officer Michael MacClean said in an interview. “But most of the time, when we are talking about small numbers such as these, they are just random occurrences.

“We will definitely continue to monitor the situation to see if over time the apparent excess of cleft palates continues,” he said. “If so, I would at that point ask for the state to come in and investigate.”

On Monday, dozens of Kettleman City residents and hundreds of landfill employees and supporters traveled to Hanford Civic Auditorium, some 40 miles away, to hear the Board of Supervisors consider an appeal of the county planning commission’s recent unanimous approval of the expansion.

Supervisors heard from several witnesses into the evening. A final decision on whether to approve the expansion is expected Dec. 22.

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