Tamaqua-area cancer cases to be part of Senate hearing on disease clusters
Disease clusters that have sickened a large number of people in the area and other states will be the topic of a Senate hearing today in Washington.
The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will hear testimony on the proposed U.S. Senate Bill 76, the “Disease Cluster Act,” aimed at confirming disease clusters and finding their causes.
Gina Solomon, senior scientist with the National Resources Defense Council, a nonprofit environmental action group, will present a report that has confirmed 42 disease clusters in 13 states across the country since 1976, including two locally.
The report references a cluster of polycythemia vera cases in Schuylkill, Luzerne and Carbon counties. In 2008, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry confirmed the diagnoses of polycythemia vera in 33 people and found rates in some areas exceeded the overall county rate by four times. Residents have pointed out that their homes are near McAdoo Associates, where toxic material was recycled and dumped until 1979 and the site made the federal Superfund list of the nation’s most toxic places.
Polycythemia vera is a blood disorder in which the bone marrow produces too many red blood cells, which causes the blood to thicken.
The report also references another cluster of 12 employees of Luzerne Intermediate Unit 18 who were diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and lupus. According to the report, in 2004, Penn State University found health hazards when trichloroethylene, or TCE, was used to clean two printing presses in the administration building in Kingston, near Wilkes-Barre. The solvent routinely spilled onto the carpet. Researchers found TCE exposures were 10,000 times higher than what the Environmental Protection Agency considers an acceptable cancer risk for someone working in the building for at least 10 years.
“The report is being released at the Senate hearing because of the problems of disease clusters across the country, how they’re being investigated and whether they’re being adequately investigated,” Solomon said. “What I would like to see is better coordination between state and federal agencies and clear guidelines for how to investigate disease clusters and to have more community involvement.”
Others who will testify at the hearing include Trevor Schaefer, a 21-year-old brain cancer survivor from Boise, Idaho, and Erin Brockovich, who became well-known for her fight to document a disease cluster in Hinkley, Calif., which was turned into a movie starring Julia Roberts.
Sens. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, proposed the legislation to fund research to determine whether connections exist between disease clusters and environmental contaminants.
By Denise Allabaugh (Staff Writer dallabaugh@citizensvoice.com)
Published: March 29, 2011
http://republicanherald.com/news/tamaqua-area-cancer-cases-to-be-part-of-senate-hearing-on-disease-clusters-1.1124935
Don’t turn Pennsylvania into Texas
Introducing his first budget last week, Gov. Tom Corbett proposed gutting state funding for education while sparing natural gas drillers from the type of production tax imposed by all other major gas-producing states. Corbett argued that a gas industry unencumbered by a production tax would turn Pennsylvania into “the Texas of the natural gas boom.”
Well, there already is a “Texas of the natural gas boom.”
It’s called Texas.
And despite a longstanding, but loophole-ridden, 7.5 percent production tax on the nation’s most productive gas wells, Texas, like most states, is faced with a huge budget deficit.
In fact, a recent report by the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that Texas’ projected budget gap for fiscal year 2012 is the largest in the nation when measured against its current budget, at 31.5 percent.
Unlike his fellow Republican budget-cutters in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where projected budget shortfalls stand at 16.4 and 12.8 percent respectively, Texas Gov. Rick Perry can’t blame greedy state employee unions or out-of-control social spending for his money woes.
State employees in Texas have long been barred from collective bargaining and the state is notoriously stingy when it comes to spending on schools and social programs.
A 2009 study by the National Education Association found Texas ranked near the bottom for per-capita spending for public welfare programs and per-student expenditures in public schools. Nearly one-quarter of Texans lack health coverage, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, compared to about 10 percent in Pennsylvania and 15 percent nationwide.
That still hasn’t helped Texas escape the downturn in tax revenues ravaging all states, due largely to a weakened economy that seems to just now be on the road to recovery.
In fact the very refusal by uber-conservatives like Perry – who has proposed that his state opt out of the Social Security system and maybe the Union itself – to even consider reasonable and fair tax increases over the years is what has driven Texas closer to the brink than any other state.
That’s the road Tom Corbett is proposing we follow in his proposed budget.
He would rather take money and services away from public-school students, the poor and elderly than impose a fair tax on the gas industry, which, by the way, contributed nearly $1 million to his campaign.
Corbett’s proposed budget is unfair, unconscionable and unethical.
And it is likely to land us in the same mess as Texas.
http://citizensvoice.com/news/don-t-turn-pennsylvania-into-texas-1.1117896#axzz1GJB7bAaK
March 13, 2011
Bromide: A concern in drilling wastewater
The high waters of the Allegheny River flow along the 10th Street Bypass last week. Public water suppliers in Pittsburgh and elsewhere in the region are concerned about higher levels of bromide in rivers and streams as natural gas drilling increases.
Ballooning bromide concentrations in the region’s rivers, occurring as Marcellus Shale wastewater discharges increase, is a much bigger worry than the risk of high radiation levels, public water suppliers say.
Unlike radiation, which so far has shown up at scary levels only in Marcellus Shale hydraulic fracturing wastewater sampling done at wellheads, the spike in salty bromides in Western Pennsylvania’s rivers and creeks has already put some public water suppliers into violation of federal safe drinking water standards.
Others, like the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority, haven’t exceeded those limits but have been pushed up against them. Some have had to change the way they treat water.
Bromide is a salty substance commonly found in seawater. It was once used in sedatives and headache remedies like Bromo-Seltzer until it was withdrawn because of concerns about toxicity. When it shows up at elevated levels in freshwater, it is due to human activities. The problem isn’t so much the bromide in the river but what happens when that river water is treated to become drinking water.
Bromide facilitates formation of brominated trihalomethanes, also known as THMs, when it is exposed to disinfectant processes in water treatment plants. THMs are volatile organic liquid compounds.
Studies show a link between ingestion of and exposure to THMs and several types of cancer and birth defects.
Marcellus Shale wastewater- current discharges
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11072/1131660-113.stm
March 13, 2011
By Don Hopey, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Don Hopey: dhopey@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1983
EOH Research Seminar: “Polycythemia Vera”
Research S
eminar Series of the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health
“Lessons learned from studying a cluster of Polycythemia Vera in Northeast Pennsylvania”
Paul I. Roda, MD, FACP
Geisinger/Hazleton Cancer Center
Location: New College Building, 8th Floor, Hem/Onc Conference Room, 245 N. 15th Street (Joint presentation with Drexel University College of Medicine)
Date: Tuesday, April 5
Noon — 1 PM
http://publichealth.drexel.edu/Home/Home/693/vobId__3363/
Rise in Childhood Cancers Parallels Toxic Chemical Proliferation
WASHINGTON, DC, January 26, 2011 (ENS) – Bipartisan legislation was introduced in Congress today to help communities determine whether there is a connection between clusters of cancer, birth defects and other diseases, and contaminants in the surrounding environment.
Senator Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat who chairs the Environment and Public Works Committee, introduced the bill with Senator Mike Crapo, an Idaho Republican and cancer survivor.
Senator Boxer said, “Whenever there is an unusual increase in disease within in a community, those families deserve to know that the federal government’s top scientists and experts are accessible and available to help, especially when the health and safety of children are at risk.”
“As a two-time cancer survivor, I know that cancer can come from many sources,” said Senator Crapo. “Through increasing federal agency coordination and accountability and providing more resources to affected communities, families will have more information and tools to maintain health and well-being.”
The bill would authorize federal agencies to form partnerships with states and academic institutions to investigate and help address disease clusters.
A coalition representing more than 11 million Americans is urging Congress to do more, specifically to update the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act without delay.
The Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families coalition warned today in a teleconference that cancer in American children has increased since 1975, while exposure to toxic chemicals has also intensified.
Environmental public health expert Dr. Richard Clapp told reporters on the call, “The incidence of childhood cancers has unequivocally been going up for last 20 years, at about a one percent increase per year.”
“We know a lot more than we did in 1975 about the causes of childhood cancers. One compenent is environmental chemical exposures, which produce damage at the cellular level,” said Dr. Clapp, professor emeritus of environmental health at Boston University School of Public Health, who served as director of the Massachusetts Cancer Registry from 1980-1989.
“Mortality has been going down because some treatments are more effective, and fewer people are dying at a childhood age from the cancer they were originally diagnosed with,” said Dr. Clapp, but he emphasized that there are many more known carcinogens in the environment now that there were in 1975.
The International Agency for Research on Cancer, a part of the World Health Organization, this year looked at over 900 chemicals and identified 107 that are known to cause cancer, said Dr. Clapp. “In 1975 there were about a dozen things known to cause cancer in humans.”
As incidences of childhood leukemia and brain cancer have increased, Dr. Clapp pointed to exposure to chlorinated solvents such as trichlorethelyene and carbon tetrachloride in drinking water as a factor in childhood cancer clusters found in Woburn, Massachusetts and Tom’s River, New Jersey.
Chlorinated solvents are used for a wide variety of commercial and industrial purposes, including degreasers, cleaning solutions, paint thinners, pesticides, resins and glues.
These are only some of the 80,000 chemicals have been produced in the United States to create commonly-used products, which include known carcinogens such as asbestos, formaldehyde, lead, cadmium, and vinyl chloride, with virtually no government oversight, warns the Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families coalition.
Last year the President’s Cancer Panel report provided confirmation that exposure to toxic chemicals is an important and under-recognized risk factor for cancer, and recommended that the government take immediate action to reverse this trend. The Panel advised Congress to reform the Toxic Substances Control Act, commenting that this law is “the most egregious example of ineffective regulation of chemical contaminants” and noting that weaknesses in the law have constrained the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from being able to properly regulate known and suspected carcinogens.
“We see cancers increasing and other diseases in kids to be increasing, and we know some of this increase is due to the increase in chemicals,” said Sean Palfrey, MD, professor of clinical pediatrics and public health at Boston University.
“We can eat them or drink, breathe them, and absorb them through our skin. They harm the blood cells related to leukemia or brain cells and show up years later,” said Dr. Palfrey.
“Cigarettes are related to cancer, so is radiation from natural sources and from radiation therapies used to treat the very cancers we are trying to cure, chemicals in food, in our houses, environmental chemicals,” he said. “These chemicals are not changing human genetics but are handing down chemicals that can affect the genetic functions of mothers and children.”
Dr. Palfrey said doctors are worried that some of the chemicals being released into the environment are untested in adult humans and in even more vulnerable children. “People like myself have been tested to see if we have them in our blood and urine – and sure enough we do,” he said.
“The problem is we are putting so many new chemicals out into our children’s environment, and our bodies have never seen these things before. Our bodies don’t know how to protect themselves, so our bodies store them, and then when woman gets pregnant those stored chemicals may be released circulated to fetal blood or breast milk,” Dr. Palfrey explained.
There are things people can do to limit their chemical exposure. Dr. Palfrey advises people to wash all produce, eat local organic produce, not use pesticides in homes and gardens, and to ask doctors if that CT scan, which subjects patients to radiation, is really necessary.
Dr. Palfrey, who has been medical director of the Boston Lead Poisoning Prevention Program, advises that renovating a house may stir up asbestos or lead, and he advises people not to buy or rent near high voltage power lines, which emit electro-magnetic frequencies.
The two doctors and Andy Igrejas, national campaign director of Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families, are among those advocating for legislation that helps prevent chemical exposure. They are urging the EPA, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Consumer Product Safety Commission to take a close look at chemicals being put into the environment.
“We should have full information on all chemicals on the market,” said Christine Brouwer, who founded Mira’s Movement in 2008 after her daughter, Mira, died at the age of four from complications of treatment for brain cancer. The organization supports and advocates on behalf of children with cancer and their families.
“I believe Mira’s brain cancer was caused by toxic chemical exposure,” Brouwer told reporters on the call.
“There are so many possible multiple sources of exposure,” she said, “baby products, bath products, household products. Lindane is used to treat lice, parents put it on their childrens’ heads. Do they know it causes cancer?”
In 2009, nine chemicals, including lindane, were added to a list of toxic substances that are to be eliminated under the Stockholm Convention, an international treaty.
“In Europe, the burden of proof of safety lies with the chemical companies, said Brouwer, “while here the company’s right to make a profit is paramount.”
New types of tumors are emerging due to exposure to new chemicals, Brouwer said. “Most people believe the government regulates chemicals, but it doesn’t,” she said, urging Congress to quickly reform the Toxic Substances Control Act.
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jan2011/2011-01-26-01.html