Childhood Leukemia Clusters: A Conversation with Joseph Wiemels
Far from the media eye, UCSF epidemiologist Joseph Wiemels, PhD, makes trips to Fallon, Nevada, a rural town of 8,000 about 60 miles east of Reno on a lonesome stretch of Highway 50, to investigate what he calls the most unusual concentration of residential childhood leukemia cases ever reported.
Local nurses were the first to call attention to the spate of cancers. The cases kept coming for years, further heightening suspicions. Local residents, including many parents of stricken children, banded together to form Families in Search of the Truth, or FIST, lobbying legislators and pushing for more investigation.
Mention cancer clusters, and if you’re old enough, you might think of Love Canal or the movie Erin Brockovich, starring Julia Roberts. But in the absence of a smoking gun, it’s profoundly difficult to find evidence that a neighborhood or town is unduly suffering from insidious malignancies due to unseen environmental threats.
Joseph Wiemels
Just by chance, some communities are going to have more cancers than others over certain periods of time. But when you already suspect you’re living in a cancer cluster, it’s easy to view all cancer cases from that suspicious perspective.
Each year, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) investigates some of the most unusual groupings of cancers. But as Wiemels explains, there has never been a case in which the CDC has concluded that a cluster could not be explained by chance, and then proceeded to identify an environmental cause. If Wiemels finds evidence to finger a specific environmental cause in the Fallon childhood leukemia cluster, it would be a first.
In Fallon, as in an Agatha Christie murder mystery, there is no shortage of suspects. They range from arsenic and tungsten to jet fuel – and even include the electromagnetic waves emitted from a powerful, old radio transmitter – a cornerstone of our nation’s defense during the century past, one that still is used as a backup for the navigation of ships at sea.
Today on the UCSF Science Café, Joe Wiemels talks about his detective work.
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Related Links
- Cancer Cluster: Tracking a Killer in Nevada
- UCSF Today, March 9, 2007