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Added nuance: A government-sponsored investigation using a narrow data set generated by a company responsible for the cleanup of a single site, of which Waycros

Added nuance: A government-sponsored investigation using a narrow data set generated by a company responsible for the cleanup of a single site, of which Waycross has multiple under investigation, decided there was no conclusive evidence of Waycross having abnormally high levels of cancer, excluding diagnoises of cancer that occured outside of the town even if the diagnosises were on town residents. Also: A town newspaper did not cover this, and the head editor as well as the mayor believes this is a case of "Facebook moms" and overly-concerned parents using personal griefs to wreck Waycross's tenuous economic bounce back.

mieseratte 8y ago
> excluding diagnoises of cancer that occured outside of the town even if the diagnosises were on town residents. That's a pretty big exclusion. It's not as if pollution gives a damn about political boundaries.
- DoctorOetker 8y ago
  it's also clearly irrelevant from a medical standpoint where the diagnosis was made... unless there's local bribing of doctors going on! so why insist on only counting local diagnoses? EDIT: perhaps there are regulations that mandate doctors to diagnose similar percentages, to prevent overdiagnosis... and perhaps this is being weaponized against discovering localized exposure to carcinogens?
  - strainer 8y ago
    > "On the cancer cluster question, ATSDR cites data from the Georgia Comprehensive Cancer Registry to make the case that there isn’t one. GCCR data from the past decade shows childhood cancer incidence has been below the state average here. GCCR’s Waycross-area data, however, "doesn’t include people who are diagnosed at hospitals in other cities", as Lexi, Harris, Gage, and Raylee all were." Charitably, I guess the researchers just don't have resources to locate patients more accurately than by their diagnosing hospitals location. It's a huge amount of noise on top of patients actual location history, which would seem to make their survey only capable of detecting persistent hotspots that span the location of many hospitals.
    - DoctorOetker 8y ago
      >"On the cancer cluster question," Either it's on the cancer cluster question, but then you contact and ascertain the accurate patient location history. Or the data never was on the cancer cluster question...
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
mcguire 8y ago
I note that it is missing from the Wikipedia page, as well.
vharuck 8y ago
>excluding diagnoises of cancer that occured outside of the town even if the diagnosises were on town residents. I would be floored if they did this. I'm a statistician who reports on cancer rates for another state, and the universal standard for assigning locations to cases is the patient's residential address. Looking at Georgia's 2016 report[1], they mention using the SEER*Stat software provided by SEER[2]. I have the same software, and I've never seen it offer any information about the reporting facility beyond a general category ("hospital", "lab", etc). They would've had to work outside the well-worn paths using a custom extract from the cancer registry. Not impossible, but also not reasonable. It's true that epidemiologists, or whoever looked into the clusters, could've been a separate unit from the statisticians behind the annual reports. And maybe they're not used to cancer epidemiology and didn't ask about best practices. But I'd be surprised if they messed up this basic thing. Also, I've heard of the study mentioned in the article where only one out of 428 cluster investigations proved true. But the way it was portrayed at a cancer registry conference, the low rate is a combination of small sample sizes and over-reporting of "clusters." Cancer's a rare and frightening event, which are two things people have trouble seeing rationally. [1] https://dph.georgia.gov/cancer-reports https://dph.georgia.gov/cancer-reports [2]https://seer.cancer.gov/ https://seer.cancer.gov/

mieseratte 8y ago

> excluding diagnoises of cancer that occured outside of the town even if the diagnosises were on town residents. That's a pretty big exclusion. It's not as if pollution gives a damn about political boundaries.

DoctorOetker 8y ago
it's also clearly irrelevant from a medical standpoint where the diagnosis was made... unless there's local bribing of doctors going on! so why insist on only counting local diagnoses? EDIT: perhaps there are regulations that mandate doctors to diagnose similar percentages, to prevent overdiagnosis... and perhaps this is being weaponized against discovering localized exposure to carcinogens?
- strainer 8y ago
  > "On the cancer cluster question, ATSDR cites data from the Georgia Comprehensive Cancer Registry to make the case that there isn’t one. GCCR data from the past decade shows childhood cancer incidence has been below the state average here. GCCR’s Waycross-area data, however, "doesn’t include people who are diagnosed at hospitals in other cities", as Lexi, Harris, Gage, and Raylee all were." Charitably, I guess the researchers just don't have resources to locate patients more accurately than by their diagnosing hospitals location. It's a huge amount of noise on top of patients actual location history, which would seem to make their survey only capable of detecting persistent hotspots that span the location of many hospitals.
  - DoctorOetker 8y ago
    >"On the cancer cluster question," Either it's on the cancer cluster question, but then you contact and ascertain the accurate patient location history. Or the data never was on the cancer cluster question...
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

mcguire 8y ago

I note that it is missing from the Wikipedia page, as well.

vharuck 8y ago

>excluding diagnoises of cancer that occured outside of the town even if the diagnosises were on town residents. I would be floored if they did this. I'm a statistician who reports on cancer rates for another state, and the universal standard for assigning locations to cases is the patient's residential address. Looking at Georgia's 2016 report[1], they mention using the SEER*Stat software provided by SEER[2]. I have the same software, and I've never seen it offer any information about the reporting facility beyond a general category ("hospital", "lab", etc). They would've had to work outside the well-worn paths using a custom extract from the cancer registry. Not impossible, but also not reasonable. It's true that epidemiologists, or whoever looked into the clusters, could've been a separate unit from the statisticians behind the annual reports. And maybe they're not used to cancer epidemiology and didn't ask about best practices. But I'd be surprised if they messed up this basic thing. Also, I've heard of the study mentioned in the article where only one out of 428 cluster investigations proved true. But the way it was portrayed at a cancer registry conference, the low rate is a combination of small sample sizes and over-reporting of "clusters." Cancer's a rare and frightening event, which are two things people have trouble seeing rationally. [1] https://dph.georgia.gov/cancer-reports https://dph.georgia.gov/cancer-reports [2]https://seer.cancer.gov/ https://seer.cancer.gov/