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100 People with rare cancers who attended same NJ high school demand answers
- js2 5y agoReporting from 17 days ago: https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/former-woodbridge-n-j-resident-confirms-65-people-who-either-attended-or-worked-at-colonia-high-school-have-had-rare-brain-tumors/ https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/former-woodbridge-n-j-r... Additional reporting from today indicating the school is currently out on spring break and they are testing for radiation and radon: https://westchester.news12.com/colonia-cancer-cluster-testers-to-use-spring-break-week-to-finish-data-collection https://westchester.news12.com/colonia-cancer-cluster-tester...
- ricardobeat 5y agoSounds like a pretty easy mystery to solve, just walk around the school with a Geiger counter. Can’t wait to hear the results.
- anthonyu 5y agoThere are many non-radioactive carcinogens.
- LinuxBender 5y agoOne can also take water and soil samples. There are numerous labs that the samples can be sent to. They can test for hundreds of carcinogens, pesticides, heavy metals, various deadly strains of bacteria and much more. Testing is generally between $80 and $400 depending on what you ask them to test for.
- dzhiurgis 5y ago$80-400 per hypothesis or per sample (a.i. one sample covers thousands of known chemicals and pathogens)?
- LinuxBender 5y agoPer sample. One sample a few small containers can be tested for hundreds of things. I've only ever sent one sample at a time but I could imagine that if one were sending many samples one could negotiate better prices. I've never tried negotiating them down.
- adamredwoods 5y agoSome US states offer free radon test kits!
- op00to 5y agoFunny you should say that. Look in the news back in the 90s, about the schools history with radioactive mysteries. :)
- op00to 5y agohttps://apnews.com/article/f10ba58472bcc0e1ababb5fc8ad8d321 https://apnews.com/article/f10ba58472bcc0e1ababb5fc8ad8d321
- 2skep 5y agoNo mention of how many kids go to this school and how big is its catchment. I don't buy the: "Lupiano eventually arrived at a single linking factor between himself, his wife and his sister: they each attended Colonia High School in Woodbridge in the 1990s" In addition to the school, he and his sister share their parents genes. He and his wife lived in the same neighbourhood so they shared many other things too.
- lin83 5y ago> Lupiano said many of those who reached out to him about their brain cancer cases "are former CHS teachers and staff members who didn’t live in Colonia, they just worked in the school."
- knappe 5y agoAs the article says, the odds are estimated to be 1 in a billion for both his wife and Lupiano to have the same rare form of cancer in the same place. Now let's talk about the odds of 100+ people all having rare forms of cancer. Maybe that is why it is news worthy!
- krisoft 5y agoI don’t think 2skep is doubting the odds. It sounds like they doubt that the high school is the >only< common link between the cases. If you take a group of 100 who attended the same high school they are also more likely to have drunk water from the same source, to have frequented the same entertainment venues, chilled in the same park and got their cars fixed at the same mechanic. Just because the all live nearby. It is possible that they carefully investigated every one of these things and the high school is the only one which is common for all cases. But it is worth keeping an open mind. (At least asking what makes them so sure it is the high school.)
- dhruvrrp 5y agoThe article specifically calls out that amongst the people who reached out to him, "are former CHS teachers and staff members who didn’t live in Colonia, they just worked in the school." Which is why I suspect that they think its the high school. Now I don't know if after 30 years they'll be able to find a lot of evidence of the source, but I'm no expert.
- pram 5y agoMakes me think of Love Canal, where they built a school and neighborhood over a toxic waste dump.
- extheat 5y agoBeing 30 minutes away from a nuclear processing facility makes the story interesting, but highly unlikely to be actually correlated. That’s just way too far. But perhaps there’s not much buildings between the school and the facility, so it could be plausible that for some reason some material ended up in the school. Testing for radiation at the school could give some hints, but I have doubts 20+ years after the fact they’re going to find much.
- cookrn 5y agoThe article mentions that contaminated soil removed from other sites could have been utilized during construction of the school
- xxxtentachyon 5y agoThe school is in a pretty dense area, less than 10 miles from NYC. If the cause were something that wasn’t unique to the building (such as proximity to a nuclear plant), I’d expect many thousands of affected
- scythe 5y agoRadiation is not a very selective poison. It will cause all kinds of cancers, not specifically rare brain tumors. In particular, leukemia is infamously related to exposure to fission products, which we know from studies on survivors of the attacks at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I actually checked the notes (hah!) I have from radbio and brain cancer didn't make the top 5 (resp. leukemia, skin, breast, bone, lung), though it certainly can happen.
- 2ICofafireteam 5y agoNJ? Brain cancer? My money is on chromium contaminated slag used as fill. Nothing to back it up.
- ohyoutravel 5y agoMaybe unrelated, but something that scared me a long time ago was that essentially of New Jersey is inside of or very close to a Superfund site. Effectively the worst of the worst environmental cleanup sites. https://www.epa.gov/superfund/search-superfund-sites-where-you-live https://www.epa.gov/superfund/search-superfund-sites-where-y...
- gruez 5y agoThe page you provided doesn't have a map, but looking at the one from wikipedia[1] makes me think it's just a heatmap of population and/or industrial activity. New jersey just looks exceptionally worse because it's a small state that is heavily urbanized. [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/91/Superfund_sites.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/91/Superfun...
- ohyoutravel 5y agoThanks for the map! Yes I somewhat agree, though superfund sites are designated as such because they’re particularly toxic and in need to remediation. NJ has a long history of industrial activity, though why it may be particularly toxic I do not know.
- adamredwoods 5y agoSadly, the cause from cancer trends is not always certain (from a Beverly Hills high School in 2006): https://latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-nov-23-me-bevhills23-story.html https://latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-nov-23-me-bevhills2... >> As the case moved along, the city and the school district groused that Brockovich-Ellis and Masry had refused to divulge data that they said showed high levels of benzene, a cancer-causing chemical. The court ordered them to do so, and the numbers showed mostly normal readings. >> The dismissals satisfied Wendy Cozen, an epidemiologist and an associate professor of preventive medicine at USC. “There’s not a lot of evidence that a standing oil well could cause Hodgkin’s or non-Hodgkin’s or thyroid cancer,” she said.
- aaaaaaaaaaab 5y agoReminds me of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kramatorsk_radiological_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kramatorsk_radiological_accide...
- colinchartier 5y agoNever saw that one before, incredibly unfortunate for the families that lived there
- aaaaaaaaaaab 5y agoI’m actually surprised this kind of thing doesn’t happen more often… See “Lessons Learned from Accidents in Industrial Radiography” for context: https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/STIPUB1058-14815945.pdf https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/STIPUB1058-14...
- tlb 5y agoRadiation is easy to detect, and you could imagine deploying them like smoke detectors in homes. I assume someone has done the analysis and decided it doesn’t pay for itself.
- DoreenMichele 5y agoSick Building Syndrome is probably much more common than is generally appreciated. I hope they figure this out, whatever the actual answer or answers turn out to be.
- dzhiurgis 5y agoNZ some younger polichickens suggested rental WOF (warrant of fitness) which IMO is great idea. We already do that for cars every year and it costs almost nothing. For housing it would cost something like 0.5% of your rent.
- treeman79 5y agoFun fact. Some common genetic disorders like the various blood clotting ones can be activated by chemical exposure in buildings or other sources. Good luck finding a lawyer for that. No one will touch it.
- hda111 5y agoThe insurance industry will prevent that any scientific study will be taken seriously. Most articles in mainstream media about Multiple Chemical Sensitivities or Sick Building Syndrome will continue to downplay the risks.
- robbiep 5y agoThis is a relevant discussion of cancer ‘clusters’ - the TL:DR is that whilst they should be investigated, there is actually no evidence of a ‘cluster’ being more than background noise generally, because actual causative agents have a distinctive pattern. Not saying this is or isn’t, but useful to bear in mind [0] https://www.mja.com.au/system/files/issues/192_11_070610/ste10216_fm.pdf https://www.mja.com.au/system/files/issues/192_11_070610/ste...
- resoluteteeth 5y agoYour link is talking about clusters of 15 or fewer people with extremely common forms of cancer like breast cancer. That is incredibly different from this case which is 100+ people with an extremely rare form of cancer. It's a good point that even if an individual cancer cluster seems improbable on its own, such clusters may occur by chance once you look for any clusters anywhere, but it's important to understand that this depends on the actual probabilities involved which are determined by both the number of cases and the type of cancer, so that is almost definitely not applicable here.
- odysseus 5y agoReminds me of this article also about NJ: https://www.nytimes.com/1996/09/29/nyregion/living-with-a-radium-nightmare.html https://www.nytimes.com/1996/09/29/nyregion/living-with-a-ra... “Half a mile away, in Orange, is the abandoned factory where the U.S. Radium Corporation made luminous watch dials from 1915 to 1926. At the time, nobody knew radium was dangerous; it was only after women who worked at the factory began getting sick and dying of cancer that the Essex County medical examiner, Dr. Harrison A. Martland, spotted the connection. By that time, soil tainted with radioactive tailings from the factory had been used to fill in low-lying areas of Essex County -- a total of 210 acres in Glen Ridge, Montclair and West Orange. It was not until 1981 that the E.P.A. -- as part of a national initiative -- conducted an aerial survey of the 12 square miles around the U.S. Radium plant. Ground surveys over the next two years confirmed the presence of dangerous gamma radiation, and the problem was first revealed publicly at the end of 1983.”
- natmaka 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls
- JKCalhoun 5y agoReminds me of Shoe Store Fluoroscopes. http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2011/ph241/birer2/ http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2011/ph241/birer2/
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y agoWould you believe me, if I told you that I used a machine like that as a child, somewhere between 1975 to 1978 in the then capital of West-Germany? In a store of the chain Salamander. As a curiosity, because we wanted to wriggle our toes in there.
- simulate-me 5y agoThere were “match girls” in England. Their jaws rotted from inhaling phosphorous in match factories. Very sad.
- rcurry 5y agoThis hits home for me. For years a few buddies of mine and I would go out coyote hunting in farm fields. In the mornings, there would be a lot of dew and our pant legs would be soaked through from walking through freshly treated corn fields. All five of us came down with various thyroid disorders - nothing as scary as brain cancer, but I was telling my buddy that I had thyroid cancer and he was like “Weird, me too, and my son and a couple of other guys have it too.” Monsanto for the win I guess.
- ChrisLomont 5y agoIf Monsanto caused it with such certainty for you, given the widespread use of Roundup, you'd expect vastly more cases. However decades of testing have shown no such effects.
- eyelidlessness 5y agoShowing no conclusive causation doesn’t negate clusters of correlation. It just begs studies to clear up the correlating relationship.
- ChrisLomont 5y ago"Clusters of correlation" is another way of saying random clusters occur from mere statistics with no input from Monsanto, but you want to blame them anyway? If cosmic rays cause some rate of cancer, then clusters will occur, and you can then blame anything for "clusters of correlation." Or we can simply look at the hundreds of studies showing that Monsanto is not causing this, studies done fully aware of proper statistical methods, and realize what the science community has known for decades.
- eyelidlessness 5y agoYou interjected “random” and that seems odd. Correlation doesn’t mean causation but that also doesn’t mean correlation is random noise. It just means there’s an unknown relationship between facts.
- aetimmes 5y agoAnother story on the topic: https://www.nj.com/news/2022/04/a-mystery-in-colonia.html https://www.nj.com/news/2022/04/a-mystery-in-colonia.html Including an anecdote from finding a radioactive rock in the school in 1999: "But when the teacher moved to an unremarkable, slate-gray, grapefruit-sized rock, the Geiger counter erupted like an alarm clock, sending the tiny gauge on the device to whiz to the highest reading levels, Gallo said." (My hometown, but did not attend the high school, AMA)
- formerkrogemp 5y agoDid you know anyone who developed cancer from your town? Maybe you should get screened regularly as well?
- aetimmes 5y agoBoth of my parents have had cancer, but neither were the rare types seemingly caused by CHS (melanoma and kidney cancer). Certainly worth keeping an eye on, though.
- formerkrogemp 5y agoI'm sorry to hear that and hope that your parents and you're healthy from here on out. I do wonder if the incidence of cancer in your area could be compared to a similar community in a sort of natural experiment to see if people in your home town were more likely to contract cancer than the other community.
- rozzie 5y agohttps://apnews.com/article/f10ba58472bcc0e1ababb5fc8ad8d321 https://apnews.com/article/f10ba58472bcc0e1ababb5fc8ad8d321
- jefftk 5y agoWhat was supposed to be a simple classroom demonstration of a Geiger counter turned into a school-closing panic when the sensitive radiation detector set up a loud clamor over a rock. Colonia High School was evacuated and a hazardous materials team clad in lead aprons borrowed from a dentist secured the rock in a lead-lined box. But scientists said Wednesday that the grapefruit-sized chunk of stone was never any threat. The radiation danger was no worse than sunlight, said William Csaszar, a radiation physicist for the state Department of Environmental Protection.
- graaben 5y agoSimilar story to where my wife went to high school, just outside NYC but on the other side of the Hudson. Multiple kids diagnosed with cancer shortly after high school, including one that died of a very rare form. My wife herself was just recently diagnosed with thyroid cancer 15 years later. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sudden-death-whats-in-the_n_1751931 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sudden-death-whats-in-the_n_1...
- aaomidi 5y agoI'm really sorry :(
- elromulous 5y agoI'm so sorry to hear this. This may not apply to your wife's cancer type, but look into car-t cell therapy, specifically AIC100 (it was fast tracked recently for certain types of thyroid cancer).
- Animats 5y agoSo has anybody tested? Radiation is so easy to detect.
- heavyset_go 5y agoHere's the actual reporting done by NJ Spotlight News[1]. [1] https://www.njspotlightnews.org/2022/04/cancer-cluster-brain-tumors-colonia-high-school-students-pfas-forever-chemicals-cdc-epa-neuro-oncology/ https://www.njspotlightnews.org/2022/04/cancer-cluster-brain...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ck2 5y agoThis is how. Knowingly allowed toxic zones within populations. In the USA. https://www.fastcompany.com/90692691/this-super-detailed-map-shows-the-most-toxic-air-in-the-county-down-to-the-block https://www.fastcompany.com/90692691/this-super-detailed-map... > At the map’s intimate scale, it’s possible to see up close how a massive chemical plant near a high school in Port Neches, Texas, laces the air with benzene, an aromatic gas that can cause leukemia. Or how a manufacturing facility in New Castle, Delaware, for years blanketed a day care playground with ethylene oxide, a highly toxic chemical that can lead to lymphoma and breast cancer. Our analysis found that ethylene oxide is the biggest contributor to excess industrial cancer risk from air pollutants nationwide. Corporations across the United States, but especially in Texas and Louisiana, manufacture the colorless, odorless gas, which lingers in the air for months and is highly mutagenic, meaning it can alter DNA.
- andygcook 5y agoThere's an abandoned fireworks factory site in my hometown and it's a similar story. A disproportionate amount of people who live around the area or spent time in the woods around the old factory have developed brain cancer: https://www.patriotledger.com/story/news/2021/03/30/state-denies-link-between-brain-cancer-cases-contaminated-hanover-site/4805126001/ https://www.patriotledger.com/story/news/2021/03/30/state-de... The area and pond where the factory used to dump their waste is now fenced and off limits.
- Overtonwindow 5y agoRelated, the book A Civil Action by Jonathan Harr. Cancer clusters in children. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Civil_Action https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Civil_Action
- SnowHill9902 5y agoI’m not saying it’s this case but it’s always a good time to remind oneself of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insensitivity_to_sample_size https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insensitivity_to_sample_size
- omarhaneef 5y agoI assume everyone reading this wonders how they would know if they are at risk of something similar. Propublica performed a great public service by putting together this cancer map: https://projects.propublica.org/toxmap/ https://projects.propublica.org/toxmap/ It pinpoints elevated cancer hotspots.
- NaturalPhallacy 5y agoCompletely unsurprised to see the chemical company dumping ground that is my home state on there. The movie dark waters (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dq0NmehbOG0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dq0NmehbOG0) is about the town I grew up in.
- LaundroMat 5y agoThe same people who dumped the same crap in my country (Belgium): https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/en/2022/04/09/is-there-pfas-contamination-in-your-street-or-neighbourhood/ https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/en/2022/04/09/is-there-pfas-contam...
- knweiss 5y agoInteractive PFSA map for the US: https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/pfas_contamination/map/ https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/pfas_contamination/map/
- bscphil 5y agoThe map reminds me of this infamous plot [1]. Look at how many more points there are in North Carolina, New Jersey, and Massachusetts than surrounding states. Naively we would conclude that these states have way more PFAS contamination. But maybe they are just considerably better about testing for and reporting it? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias#/media/File:Survivorship-bias.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias#/media/File:...
- refurb 5y ago
- aluminussoma 5y agoThe news story correlates school attendance with cancer diagnosis. Most schools draw students from specific neighborhoods nearby. Everyone focuses on the school itself. I want to know if the "pollutant" could have come from the neighborhood instead. The article doesn't mention anything about teachers being affected. Teachers are likely to live in different areas than the student.
- pikma 5y agoFrom the article: Lupiano said many of those who reached out to him about their brain cancer cases "are former CHS teachers and staff members who didn’t live in Colonia, they just worked in the school."
- lettergram 5y ago
- bilalq 5y agoOh wow. You always see these occasional viral stories of small towns having such problems brought up, but it's still a little surreal to see one that hits so close to home. I grew up in Woodbridge, but went to a different high school in the township, JFK Memorial High. I have a ton of friends who went to Colonia and would often be there for track meets and other events. My parents and siblings still live there as well. I expect the frequency of such stories to increase over the years. Who knows how many dangerous actions have been carried out (and continue to be carried out) with side-effects that only surface after a long delay.
- londons_explore 5y agoI think it's super disappointing that this was discovered by some guy asking people on Facebook. If there is a hotspot or common pattern in a disease, it should be a department of health research team who finds it by doing statistics on medical records. They should identify the pattern and the root cause, and do what's necessary to make sure no more people get affected right away. Eg. Close the school till any contamination has been found and fixed. It's just crazy for a government not to be trying to find things that have such widespread health impacts.
- mandmandam 5y agoI feel like by now everyone ought to know the lengths govt agencies will go to, to keep shit like that under wraps. Like bro, Brockovich is still fighting, decades later. Assange is rotting away before the world's eye. Donziger is still under arrest. Environmental activists are the number one threat in the eyes of many government agencies. Not right wing racist extremists, not corporate polluters, not too big to fail banks - environmental awareness groups. It IS disappointing, and it IS crazy, but anything which threatens the status quo gets thrown in a black site by BOTH AISLES, and we really can't afford to pretend that's not the case.
- LorenPechtel 5y agoYeah, when amateurs get into the cancer cluster business the results tend to not be good. The city I grew up in had such a problem. A cancer cluster was discovered. A local rag far more interested in government-bashing than the truth wouldn't let go even when the researchers looked into it and found it was a cluster of cancer *patients*, not a cluster of cancer *diagnoses*. What was really going on is that it was the cheapest part of town that was still safe to live in. Cancer is expensive, cancer victims were moving there. Last I knew it had become a part of town I wouldn't enter even during daylight.
- mkl95 5y agoIs Asbestos common in old ceilings over there?
- pxeger1 5y agoAsbestos only causes very specific form of cancer, and only really in the lungs. I don't think this can be related
- ncmncm 5y agoMonsanto got so much bad press that it doesn't exist anymore. Anyway the name doesn't exist. It is just an unnamed part of BASF now. Still doing all the same stuff.
- krn 5y agoThe key quotes from 2022[1]: > "What I find alarming is there's truly only one environmental link to primary brain tumors and that's ionizing radiation. It's not contaminated water. It's not air. It's not something in soil. It's not something done to us due to bad habits," Lupiano said. And from 1997[2]: > What was supposed to be a simple classroom demonstration of a Geiger counter turned into a school-closing panic when the sensitive radiation detector set up a loud clamor over a rock. > Colonia High School was evacuated and a hazardous materials team clad in lead aprons borrowed from a dentist secured the rock in a lead-lined box. [...] > Earth science teacher Rita English was demonstrating the Geiger counter Tuesday with small, store-bought samples when students encouraged her to try other rocks that had been kept in a storage cabinet. > ``She touched some small rocks and it made little `click, click’ noises,″ said Tyrona Timmons, 15. > ``Then she brought out this big rock, and when she touched it, it started beeping real loud.″ [...] > The rock was identified as uraninite, a uranium-containing stone which exists in New Jersey but is more common in Colorado and Utah. How it came to the school is anybody’s guess and officials were trying to contact former teachers, Seitz said. [1] https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/former-woodbridge-n-j-resident-confirms-65-people-who-either-attended-or-worked-at-colonia-high-school-have-had-rare-brain-tumors/ https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/former-woodbridge-n-j-r... [2] https://apnews.com/article/f10ba58472bcc0e1ababb5fc8ad8d321 https://apnews.com/article/f10ba58472bcc0e1ababb5fc8ad8d321
- sokoloff 5y agoWhy would a hazmat team need to borrow lead aprons from a dentist? Surely those are not the best radiation shields in existence but rather just good enough for the purpose.
- pxeger1 5y agoMy guess would be contaminated building materials used to build the school.
- Gatsky 5y agoAcoustic neuromas (almost 100% curable) and glioblastoma (aggressive, very poor outcomes) are quite different diseases. It is unlikely there is a unifying exposure. One technique to unravel this is to perform whole genome sequencing on the tumours. Mutagenic carcinogens (which isn’t all carcinogens, but generally includes ionizing radiation) will leave signatures in the tumour DNA. The same unexpected signature in the acoustic neuromas and malignant gliomas would be a smoking gun. Incidentally, I don’t know why nobody has used this fact to sue Big Tobacco into oblivion. You can literally prove cigarettes caused your lung/head and neck cancer.
- sigmoid10 5y ago> I don’t know why nobody has used this fact to sue Big Tobacco into oblivion. People did. All the way to the Supreme Court. Big Tobacco lost millions because of that. See e.g. here: https://www.reuters.com/article/idINBRE82P0NR20120326 https://www.reuters.com/article/idINBRE82P0NR20120326
- z3t4 5y agoRadiation is probably underrated. Our bodies are not built to handle concentrated radiation. We are lucky to live on a planet with a great radiation shield. But we probably don't know how lucky we are.