100 People with rare cancers who attended same NJ high school demand answers | Hacker News Reader

100 People with rare cancers who attended same NJ high school demand answers

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318 pointsRickJWagner137 comments

This 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.

I'm sorry for what you and your friends have been through. I'm curious why you cite Monsanto here? A thyroid cancer cluster is far more likely caused by exposure to radioactive iodine than a pesticide.

I was just being glib, but we all figured it was from exposure to one or more pesticides:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6480006/

But who knows, could just be coincidence.

My and my extended family lived on a farm.

One of my cousin was born with a severe heart defect and had to go through several open heart surgeries. Another cousin had a double acute leukemia when he was a kid. Lots of cancer (but most of them were smokers). Lots of thyroid problems too.

Any chance this was in central Nebraska?

One possibility: Operation Plumbbob, a series of open air nuclear tests in 1957, generated considerable fallout in north central NE.

Project Sedan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedan_(nuclear_test)

That looks more probable for Iowa than NE. Still, great link! Never seen the before

any link to fallout maps? None are listed in the wikipedia

This report might be of use:

https://acsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.3322/canj...

Very good article, thanks

Interesting location choice. Why central NE?

Family of a friend was involved with a cancer cluster near Grand Island. I think there is some environmental contamination of some sort, I know there are agg chemicals in the aquifer. Similar shockingly high numbers for a relatively small community.

Wisconsin.

This thread has got some wild traction around Monsanto and glyphosate, which is just funny doublethink and another level of control.

The EPA regulations concerning various industrial chemicals are useless in general and have been from the very beginning: the chemical lobby managed to grandfather in close to a hundred thousand different chemicals that are ”Generally Regarded As Safe” just because nobody has cared enough to study most of their effects on humans.

Regardless of glyphosate, if you live, breathe, drink and eat on U.S. soil, you are already fucked and it is only a matter of when the timer goes off.

> if you live, breathe, drink and eat on U.S. soil, you are already fucked and it is only a matter of when the timer goes off.

In fact, come to think of it, this holds true almost everywhere. Us humans are in the middle of a mortality epidemic.

Sadly true, even in Europe PFOS has been dumped in the environment for decades and only lately attention has been paid to those and other endocrine disruptor forever-chemicals.

I meant more in the “100% of humans die” sense :)

If 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.

> If Monsanto caused it with such certainty for you, given the widespread use of Roundup, you'd expect vastly more cases.

Monsanto has settled 40,000+ cases, that’s significant and a lot of cases.

I’m not sure your threshold of vastly more cases but when you consider Roundup only came to market in 1976 it’s even more staggering, whereas some of the major tobacco companies had been around 100+ years before losing similar lawsuits.

Also it’s not very clear what your threshold of “certainty” is, but my guess is you are trying to apply a higher standard of proof than the courts and law require.

> However decades of testing have shown no such effects.

That’s just not true, the most complete study published concludes that using glyphosate increases the risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma by 41 percent.

There's 181 studies citing that one on Google scholar. I think the science has moved past the paper you claim as the most complete study. You should look through them instead of latching onto a single paper when there's ample rebuttals in the literature.

You can find climatologists that deny global warming. Thus it's not credible to pick one of thousands of results as the truth. Pick the majority of expert opinions, not the outliers.

> You can find climatologists that deny global warming.

It sounds like your argument is that if people can deny climate change, you can deny roundup causes harm…apparently without the need to cite anything. How many of those 181 studies citing the first concluded something completely inconsistent with the first study?

If you think there is a more complete study disproving the 41% increased cancer risk, why not cite or link the study?

> Pick the majority of expert opinions, not the outliers.

In the case of Roundup/Glyphosate we can skip our own interpretations of hundreds of studies, do you know why? Because the company that manufactures the product in question settled ~96,000 claims for ~$10B. Therefore, we can confidently conclude that after taking into consideration the opinions of their own expert witnesses that they hired and who reviewed all available studies, and could have relied on only the most favorable studies at trial, their opinion was Roundup/Glyphosate causes harm and they should settle.

And DOW Corning made a huge settlement over breast implants--but the science eventually showed the whole issue was a complete bust--the women with implants had fewer cases of the reported problems that women without.

Deep pockets + obviously hurting "victim" ends up being guilty until proven innocent and rarely can innocence be proven in the courtroom.

> In the case of Roundup/Glyphosate we can skip our own interpretations of hundreds of studies

This is a completely insane conclusion for anyone who knows anything at all abut the American legal system. Businesses and individuals settle lawsuits or plead guilty when they are innocent constantly because they believe the end result of doing so is likely to be better for them than the alternative. It is not at all hard to imagine a scenario where a company decides to settle a complicated lawsuit rather than trust a jury to make the right decision and give the press an even bigger field day with dragging their name through the mud.

I have no love for big ag, but this is just an obvious fact about how legal conflicts work in the United States.

> This is a completely insane conclusion for anyone who knows anything at all abut the American legal system.

From the sound of it, you’re just regurgitating things you have heard but don’t have much 1st hand experience with. If you are a lawyer, it doesn’t sound like you have worked on billion dollar cases. I helped nearly 1,000 claimants on one of the largest tobacco jury verdicts and it was was only an award of ~$800M. So it’s not a knock and I could be wrong, you might be a lawyer too with a plethora of experience in billion dollar cases, it’s just extraordinarily rare and I don’t see someone with that experience making your comment.

There is a difference between a plea deal on a criminal case and even a settlement on your average personal injury case where legal fees might outweigh judgments, and cases that involve over a hundred thousand plaintiffs/claimants and billions of dollars in damages. While maybe 90% of cases do settle, billion dollar cases don’t often settle, and this settlement ranks among the largest settlements in history (top 3 or 4). Basically you have cases like the BP oil spill and other big tobacco cases exceeding this settlement. No one settles for $10B because they are worried the jury will get it wrong, nor did these companies settle because they were worried about press having a field day.

Your claim to authority here is helping out claimants on a tobacco case, a situation where the companies were unquestionably guilty.

With Monsanto, you have to look at the context. They have been repeatedly sued and lost jury trials, with absurd damages into the hundreds of millions awarded to individual claimants. With any jury trial, the chance of Monsanto losing is (empirically) well above 90%. If you can settle 100k claims at a cost on the order of one percent of what individual claimants are making in their lawsuits against you, it's not unreasonable to take that.

As others have repeatedly said, the question has nothing to do with whether or not the science is on Monsanto's side. Expecting a corporation to act on the basis of moral integrity is pretty laughable, as I'd expect you agree. They're acting on the basis of what they think they can get a jury to accept. If it turns out that juries are particularly awful at interpreting and respecting scientific research, you have to take that into account. If it turns out that settling a class action for way less than claimants have been making in individual lawsuits solves a lot of problems for you, it's reasonable to do that.

Note that I'm not claiming that glyphosate is safe. I'm only claiming that you can't act as if the results of jury trials (or settlements made to avoid jury trials) settle the scientific question.

> Your claim to authority here is helping out claimants on a tobacco case, a situation where the companies were unquestionably guilty.

I’m not claiming authority, in fact I did the exact opposite, I highlighted my lack of experience in billion dollar plus cases. However, my experience is enough within the industry to provide alternative insights to someone who thinks billion dollar cases settle like your average rank and file case, or even more unrelated like plea deals in criminal cases.

And no the tobacco companies were not “unquestionably guilty.” First “guilt” is a criminal term and immaterial as we are talking about civil cases and civil liabilities. Second some tobacco cases still go to trial, the companies actually win some despite being “unquestionably guilty.”

As it relates to liability with respect to the tobacco cases the studies tend to show tobacco products increase lung cancer risk anywhere from 15-30% and the glyphosate study I referenced concluded a 40% NHL cancer risk increase. So naturally I’m curious about the standard you apply when you say the tobacco companies were “unquestionably guilty” unlike glyphosate manufacturers, when the increased risk of a given cancer is higher as a total percentage for glyphosate than tobacco. If tobacco companies were “unquestionably guilty” and glyphosate is shown to increase cancer risk as a total percentage more than tobacco, please enlighten me about the science.

Everyone here who has responded to my comment is talking about “the science”, including you, whereas I’m the only one that bothered to reference a single statistic from a glyphosate study and no one else has bothered to address that study on the merits, except one response that accepts the 40% increase risk as true, but argues that’s a “small increase.” Finally, I’m not acting as though the jury trial settles the science, but when I’m the only one to reference a study and the replies don’t dispute the study or bother citing any studies of their own, then 90,000+ voluntary settlements by the product manufacturer are useful enough for this discussion on HN.

Judges, Juries and lawyers aren't scientists.

Monsanto doesn't trust those three groups of non-scientists to think like scientists, especially when the prosecution is going to be pulling on the heartstrings.

The decision you've made is to trust a party of non-scientists (Monsanto lawyers) who work in a non-scientific field (jury trials) over the actual body of evidence built by actual scientists doing actual science. Perhaps because the science doesn't support your position.

Bingo. It's also why so many scientists and scientific academies came out to complain about those verdicts (which will still bring litigated).

All the won lawsuits kind of support the link between cancer and Roundup. Also stuff like this makes believe that there are many cases out there:

"the lawyer for the RoundUp Virginia plaintiffs had been charged with extortion after offering to stop searching for more plaintiffs if he was paid a $200 million consulting fee by a manufacturer of glyphosate."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundup_(herbicide)#Legal

No, the won lawsuits support the link between good lawyers and winning cases. Lawsuits have no evidentiary value with respect to scientific proof.

Agreed. The courts are not respecting the science. They are pandering to public outrage.

Your science credentials are...?

Bad faith question. You don't need science credentials to understand that court rulings aren't scientific evidence. It's either a true statement or it isn't (and it is).

It seems to me that the companies producing these chemicals have a very strong vested interest in _proving_ that there is no connection between the chemicals they produce and any kind of serious health effects.

On the other hand, there are many published studies that strongly support negative health effects:

> The team determined that exposure to glyphosate may increase the risk of Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma by as much as 41 percent [0]

[0] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/02/190214093359.h...

Increased risk by as much as 41 percent... Okay, most risk of developing cancer is pretty low.

https://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancer-basics/lifetime-probabi...

So, I found Hodgkin lymphoma at 2.43%. Increased by 41%, 2.43% * 1.41 = 3.43%. Now any increase in cancer risk is alarming, but this is a small increase. More important question would be. How many people are getting increased exposure to glyphosate? If it's only 1000 people annually, then it looks like ten more people gets cancer. If it's a global exposure, then yes, we have a big problem.

Edited to correct math mistakes, thanks tomsmeding

It's 41% increase, not 4% increase.

Showing no conclusive causation doesn’t negate clusters of correlation. It just begs studies to clear up the correlating relationship.

"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.

You 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.

The point is that a random data set will spontaneously produce clustered groups of apparent events that are not due to any underlying cause.

And a non-random data set will produce clusters of correlations which don’t have causal explanations. I’m well aware of this axiom which is why I found it important to address.

And if there were such clusters beyond pure random noise, they'd show up in studies. They don't, hence they're random noise.

How many heads in a row would you expect from an unbiased coin if you flip it long enough?

That is your "clusters of correlation."

Correlation most certainly does not imply an unknown relation between facts.

In fact, there are more completely unrelated correlations than there are correlations caused by related things. This is simple statistics.

Proof? Consider M things related that show a correlation. Suppose some other thing randomly by chance correlates, and that thing has N items correlated by some other set of related facts. Then all the not causally related cross correlations between the M and N items vastly outnumber the causally ones.

So no, correlation absolutely does not imply an unknown relation. It points to a place to look.

I have a bridge to sell you.

Reminds me of this article also about NJ: 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.”

> At the time, nobody knew radium was dangerous

The Wikipedia article on radium seems to imply that some people were aware of the dangers:

> During the litigation, it was determined that the company's scientists and management had taken considerable precautions to protect themselves from the effects of radiation, but it did not seem to protect their employees.

There are so many terrifying stories about stuff like this. I don’t remember the site, but there’s a website where you can research superfund allocations and it’s really frightening to learn that the parking lot two hundred meters from where you work in NJ was the site of a massive insecticide dump that used to spontaneously ignite.

Assuming this might be the link mentioned above:

https://www.epa.gov/superfund/search-superfund-sites-where-y...

What town was that in? I used to live in Jersey City and every other block in my neighborhood was listed because of hexavalent chromium contamination.

Yeah, it was JC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goiânia_accident

> scraped some additional dust out of the source and took it to his house

> spread some of it on the concrete floor

> His six-year-old daughter later ate an egg while sitting on this floor

> She was also fascinated by the blue glow of the powder, applying it to her body and showing it off to her mother.

> Dust from the powder fell on the egg she was consuming

> she eventually absorbed 1.0 GBq and received a total dose of 6.0 Gy, more than a fatal dose even with treatment.

Glowing blue dust that kills families.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lia_radiological_accident

In this incident 3 villagers find abandoned radioisotope thermoelectric generator cores in the forest and cozy up to them:

> Around the canisters there was no snow for about a 1 m (3.3 ft) radius, and the ground was steaming.

> the men decided to move the sources a short distance and make camp around them

> The men used the sources to keep them warm through the night, positioning them against their backs, and as close as 10 cm (3.9 in). The next day, the sources may have been hung from the backs of Patient 1-DN and 2-MG as they loaded wood onto their truck.

The stuff of nightmares really.

Plainly Difficult on YouTube covers these kinds of stories. Tragic as they are interesting :/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_Girls

There were “match girls” in England. Their jaws rotted from inhaling phosphorous in match factories. Very sad.

Reminds me of Shoe Store Fluoroscopes. http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2011/ph241/birer2/

Would 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.

I 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/

It pinpoints elevated cancer hotspots.

That’s entirely modeled risk?

They basically took emissions and a model the EPA has of cancer risk (wide confidence intervals and all) then came up with risk “zones”.

Exposure wasn’t measured, which is a massive unknown.

I mean, it’s interesting but I’m not sure I’d put much weight into any one individual living in those areas.

Completely 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) is about the town I grew up in.

The same people who dumped the same crap in my country (Belgium): https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/en/2022/04/09/is-there-pfas-contam...

Interactive PFSA map for the US: https://www.ewg.org/interactive-maps/pfas_contamination/map/

The 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:...

The 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-r...

[2] https://apnews.com/article/f10ba58472bcc0e1ababb5fc8ad8d321

Why 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.

Reporting from 17 days ago:

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-tester...

Another story on the topic: 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)

https://apnews.com/article/f10ba58472bcc0e1ababb5fc8ad8d321

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.
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.

Yeah. Alpha and beta radiation is normally harmless unless it's inside your body. Uranium is far more hazardous as a toxic metal than as a radioactive material. Yes--stay away from anyplace depleted uranium rounds were used or depleted uranium armor was hit. Stay away for chemical reasons, not nuclear ones.

Did you know anyone who developed cancer from your town? Maybe you should get screened regularly as well?

Both 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.

I'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.

Similar 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_1...

I'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).

I'm really sorry :(

Sadly, 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-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.

Being 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.

The article mentions that contaminated soil removed from other sites could have been utilized during construction of the school

Radiation 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.

This. Radioiodine can cause thyroid cancer but other than that when you're looking at a cluster of rare cancers don't look at radioactivity.

On the other hand, we have had many cancer clusters that make the most sense as if they were infectious agents. Now, cancer is obviously no infectious--but we already know HPV is responsible for a lot of cancer, including strains that produce no symptoms. It's quite reasonable to think there might be other viruses that are carcinogenic but otherwise asymptomatic and thus staying below the radar.

Indeed. "If the radiation dose is low and/or it is delivered over a long period of time (low dose rate), the risk is substantially lower because there is a greater likelihood of repairing the damage. There is still a risk of long-term effects such as cancer, however, that may appear years or even decades later."

https://www.who.int/en/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/ionizing...

The 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

no love for staten island ;_;

Don't worry, you are protected by your majestic landfill.

Reminds me of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kramatorsk_radiological_accide...

Radiation 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.

Never saw that one before, incredibly unfortunate for the families that lived there

I’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/STIPUB1058-14...

I 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.

Yeah, 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.

I 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.

Maybe 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-y...

The 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/Superfun...

Thanks 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.

Makes me think of Love Canal, where they built a school and neighborhood over a toxic waste dump.

Sick 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.

NZ 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.

Fun 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.

The 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.

Here's the actual reporting done by NJ Spotlight News[1].

[1] https://www.njspotlightnews.org/2022/04/cancer-cluster-brain...

The 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.

From 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."

NJ? Brain cancer? My money is on chromium contaminated slag used as fill.

Nothing to back it up.

Sounds like a pretty easy mystery to solve, just walk around the school with a Geiger counter. Can’t wait to hear the results.

One 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.

$80-400 per hypothesis or per sample (a.i. one sample covers thousands of known chemicals and pathogens)?

Per 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.

There are many non-radioactive carcinogens.

Funny you should say that. Look in the news back in the 90s, about the schools history with radioactive mysteries. :)

https://apnews.com/article/f10ba58472bcc0e1ababb5fc8ad8d321

Some US states offer free radon test kits!

Acoustic 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.

> 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

Oh 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.

Monsanto 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.

No 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.

As 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!

I 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.)

The 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.

I understand where you are going with this, however, if they all drank from the same water supply, wouldn't parents also be susceptible? Anything else would be the same thing where the parents would also have been subjected to the whatever. The school is the one place where the kids went and spent significant time that the parents did not.

It's mentioned that a number of people didn't live in the area, they just worked at the school. That might be why the school is interesting.

Odds are not that low. In the 55 years since opening this high school would have had at least 20,000 unique people associated with it.

Expected number of cancer cases would probably be several thousand.

Claims of primary brain cancer derived from social media are probably not too accurate. A proper study is going to discard most as being confused with other cancers. So now you aren't looking at an unimaginable rate.

I read that as the only factor all three share. n=3 would of course be kinda weak for this but apparently n>3 by a lot, so ...

This sort of thing seems to be not that rare, I know of a few other ... toxic schools, including my (German) secondary school. A few years after I graduated, they roped off a building after repair workers discovered that the building was chock full of asbestos, with the stuff present in air samples as well. Officially no one knew it was there at all, and the building was built at a time when asbestos toxicity was already widely known (not yet outlawed though).

> 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."

I’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

There'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-de...

The area and pond where the factory used to dump their waste is now fenced and off limits.

This 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/ste...

Your 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.

This is how. Knowingly allowed toxic zones within populations. In the USA.

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.

Related, the book A Civil Action by Jonathan Harr. Cancer clusters in children. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Civil_Action

Radiation 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.

So has anybody tested? Radiation is so easy to detect.

My guess would be contaminated building materials used to build the school.

Is Asbestos common in old ceilings over there?

Asbestos only causes very specific form of cancer, and only really in the lungs. I don't think this can be related

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