01x09 - Deadly Neighborhoods

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at this Catholic elementary school in

Phoenix Arizona eleven children

contracted childhood leukemia and nine

of those children died and in Guilford

Connecticut five brain tumors on a

street with only nine homes two towns -

cancer clusters - mysteries the

investigation into these two

neighborhoods answered some questions

but raised many more

Arizona has always been known for its

warm dry climate and clean desert air

what was once primarily desert and

farmland has gradually been transformed

as the population moved west

so did development and industry and

along with it new environmental problems

do we have a problem do I need to be

concerned if not then I leave right now

are you saying no this public meeting

was the voice concerns and get some

answers about the unusually high number

of childhood leukemia cases in the

Phoenix suburb of Maryvale between 1961

and 1985 11 children attending st.

Vincent DePaul's Catholic elementary

school developed acute lymphocytic

leukemia 9 of those children died almost

every grade had two classrooms and it

was a school that had a waiting list to

get into half the school shut down now

people don't want to send their kids

there anymore even more alarming in the

neighborhood surrounding the school

there were 49 cases of childhood

leukemia two and a half times higher

than normal

Ramona Barret lived in Maryvale when her

youngest daughter Jessica developed

leukemia and died I thought it was maybe

something I did while I was pregnant and

I would just rack my brain to think what

happened what did I do and I couldn't

think of anything that I had done

different than with my other two

children and you know it's still I still

don't know and I mean it's always gonna

bother me the rest of my life

sandy Mathews thinks back to and

remembers her son Josh and the two-year

battle he waged against leukemia but

lost to sit and hold my child after a

radiation treatment when you know he

he's just dry heaving and throwing up

and you can feel his pain and there's

nothing you can do you know take that

away and that's what leukemia came to

mean to us is you know

watching a loss of life from somebody

that was so alive the Arizona State

Health Department was alarmed

norm Peterson headed the investigation

you try to find something that these

people have in common you would like to

know for instance if all of their

parents worked in the same factory or a

fall of their mother's had had x-rays

while they have been pregnant one of the

first things investigators tried to

discover is this a true cancer cluster

or a random occurrence if the average

rate of cancer in a city is 1 in every

10 households for example we assume that

the distribution of those cancers will

be more or less equal but if it isn't

and the same number of cancer cases

happen in a group or cluster scientists

try to figure out if it's because of

chance or if there is a reason for the

cluster the rate of childhood leukemia

in Maryvale was higher than it should

have been and the residents first

suspected pollution we know there's a

problem there are studies that show

benzene does cause childhood leukemia

benzene comes from gasoline here's the

kids here's the area where children have

been dying of leukemia here's the gas

storage facility right here do you think

it's just coincidence the t*nk farm near

the cluster site was suspected of

leaking benzene into the atmosphere

benzene has been linked to leukemia but

not to the type found in the Maryvale

cancer cluster cancerous cancer whether

it's leukemia whether it's cancer of the

brain cancer the skin cancer the stomach

cancer the lungs

cancer is cancer but researchers say

that isn't entirely correct there are

many different kinds of cancer with many

different causes for cancer to develop

two things must happen first a cell

becomes damaged in some way by an

inherited defect or by something like

radiation a virus or a chemical then

something has to activate the cell like

the chemicals in cigarette smoke or

illusion the result cells which multiply

out of control

creating junk piles of abnormal cells

called tumors for reasons that we don't

completely understand childhood

leukemias tend to cluster and there have

been many many leukemia clusters and

children described in the literature but

what causes a large number of leukemia

cases to cluster in a small neighborhood

such as Maryvale norm Peterson sent

detailed questionnaires to the families

of the cancer victims and immediately

tested the st. Vincent DePaul school we

immediately went out did a radiation

survey to see that there hadn't been for

instance some radioactive material

incorporated into the structure they

also tested radiation levels in the

school yard and surrounding

neighborhoods to see if electric power

lines or a substation might have been

involved since much of Merrivale had

been farmland back in the 60s and

routinely sprayed with insecticides

could this have affected the drinking

water

some residents remembered contaminated

Wells closed by the city a few years

earlier the block I grew up on was right

smack in the middle of it it's looking

back it's very scary to think we live

with this and why the citizens of

Maryvale wanted answers their home bags

were tumbling their children dying what

was causing the high rates of childhood

leukemia at this catholic elementary

school in arizona and in the surrounding

neighborhood it was a cancer cluster

which took the lives of 32 children and

hospitalized 17 others you wanted to run

away but then you you you know you want

it to move sellout let's go away let's

go somewhere else but your children who

have lives you have jobs you have a home

you can't just you just cannot walk away

from everything this this absolute what

I would consider destruction of faith

even with the church your children are

in a Catholic school you know you're a

practicing Catholic you think wow you

know well if nothing else you know the

ship O'Brien will stand there and say

well maybe we better do something

everywhere we turned

we ran into the same Stonewall it was a

rate of cancer more than twice what it

should have been and the residents

wanted to know what the state medical

detectives were doing about it my

children go to st. Vincent DePaul it was

focused there or my children say to play

there to drink the water how long is it

going to take

I mean we're scared especially since

we've been there when state

epidemiologist reviewed the test results

of st. Vincent DePaul school they

learned some shocking information the

air quality drinking water levels of

pesticides and radiation were all within

state and federal safety levels and they

noticed something else these levels were

below those found in other schools and

in other neighborhoods the nearby wells

which had been contaminated were closed

years earlier and weren't used for

drinking water the drinking water for

Maryvale was tested and found to be safe

next Peterson and his staff investigated

the local industries we looked at

industries from two aspects we look at

sources of air pollution and we

basically went

an inventory of what they were releasing

but they could identify no toxins in

amounts that could be linked with the

excess cancers Peterson was concerned

that he might never find the cause of

the cancer cluster cancer doesn't leave

a fingerprint or clue of any kind as to

what caused it and unlike other

illnesses leukemia patients like josh

phillips produce no antibodies to the

cancer-causing agent when you get into

childhood leukemia there are no nice

neat little antibodies to anything there

is nothing that says that that leukemia

is caused by radiation as opposed to

being caused by benzene as opposed to

being caused by electromagnetic fields

so this becomes a much more difficult

problem and we the Achilles heel of

environmental epidemiology really is

trying to determine what somebody's

exposure was many many years ago when

the environmental studies couldn't find

anything suspicious

Peterson decided to examine the homes

where the cancer victims lived air dust

water pesticides heavy metals and

radiation from appliances were all

tested to see if these homes differed in

any way from others anything that has

been shown in some previous study to

have been somehow associated with an

excess of childhood leukemia we

considered it but it was of little help

after 10 years and over 2 million

dollars worth of investigation the

Arizona state officials couldn't find

anything they could link to the cause of

the cancer cluster but the residents of

Maryvale weren't satisfied my question

is where where's this lack of accepting

responsibility and when is enough enough

it's the same old question and we never

got an answer for that nobody'd ever

step up to the to the podium and say

look yes you do have a problem and yes

we do need to fix it let's all get

together and fix it and how can you say

that you know that that doesn't come

back to something I mean it has to come

back to something in common for all

these people so that's what I feel

there's a lot of distrust of government

a lot of it is justified and for the

public to not trust us the should not

come as a surprise and it now appears

the cancer cluster has ended since 1986

the cancer rates in the area have

dropped dramatically and are now among

the lowest in the United States either

the Maryvale cancer cluster was a random

occurrence or the cancer-causing agent

if there was one has long since gone

when we're trying to understand what

caused a cancer pattern in the community

we're really trying to find about out

about an event that occurred 20 or 30

years ago that's very difficult to do

imagine what would happen for example if

you had an automobile accident and

instead of your bone breaking right away

it broke 30 years later right and then

when confronted with somebody with a

broken bone you had to think back over

all the other things that might have

happened to them over the the

intervening 20 or 30 years but in

another town thousands of miles away

there was another cancer cluster this

time residents had a suspect wild the

residents of Maryvale Arizona were

living through their cancer cluster

another was developing in Connecticut it

was on this dead-end road meadow Street

in Guilford Connecticut a working-class

neighborhood in a mostly Relf to do town

about two hours drive outside of New

York City out of nine homes on this

street there had been five brain tumor

cases when Bob penstock heard of this

unusually high number of brain tumors he

was alarmed his son and granddaughter

lived on meadow Street that's probably

the best question you could ever ask

residents were convinced they knew the

cause of this high rate of cancer they

blamed the electric substation it takes

up one side of meadow Street and sits

only a hundred feet away from the

closest houses electrical substations

transform high-voltage power into lower

voltages before going through

residential power lines into homes it's

a big noisy neighbor to the residents of

meadow Street giving off high levels of

electromagnetic energy which frightens

even scientific researchers I wouldn't

want to live there that I wouldn't and I

certainly wouldn't want my children to

be raising their children across the

street from the substation and as a

matter of fact when my daughter was

buying

housed in a working-class section of

Cambridge I went to look at the house

and there was a step-down transformer

outside the room I would say three feet

from the room that the baby was going to

be in and I was absolutely opposed to

her putting a kid in there dr. Eva

Goodman is a cell biologist at Columbia

University she is conducting research to

see if electromagnetic fields can change

our cells making them more susceptible

to cancer with electromagnetic fields a

little bit can be bad then they can be

an increase which will have no effect

then there can be a greater increase

that can be very bad and the whole

problem is to find the range within

which these fields have an effect at the

cellular level life on meadow Street

hasn't been the same since an article in

The New Yorker magazine strongly

suggested that electromagnetic fields

from this substation might be

responsible for the illnesses on meadow

Street Jack walleston remembers meadow

Street he grew up there and when he

married and started a family he bought a

house just down the street from his

parents on meadow Street he blames the

electric substation for the death of his

entire family his father died of a brain

tumor at the age of 54 his sister died

at the age of 54 and doctors removed a

brain tumor from the front of jack

Waltons head when I was 35 years old and

I had that operation at that present

time this meningioma told me that I had

was the largest in the history of Hill

named in hospital larger than I launched

me up food like I said I do have a

reoccurrence of it Melissa Bullock was

Jack Waltons next-door neighbor she was

a high school basketball star and

straight-a student she also developed a

brain tumor at the age of 16 which

required surgery and radiation but she

survived in 1987 the local newspaper did

a little investigation of its own and

discovered this startling number of

cancer cases not only around the

electric substation

along the entire length of the high

power lines throughout the state I can

give you a name after name of people who

lived along the power lines that have

died with cancer malignancy of some type

from one street to another some of more

relations some of my friends we as

individual never been able to prove that

this is what does it but I firmly

believe this has got a lot to do with it

The Electric Company acknowledges that

the levels of electromagnetic radiation

are high at the substation itself but

that they drop off significantly further

away Bob Carberry is the manager of

transmission lines and civil engineering

for the Power Company the levels that

I've observed on medically due to power

facilities are quite common if there was

a real problem here should be showing up

in more places in middle street the

power company says the levels of

radiation near the meadow Street homes

are within the normal range within

normal because radiation exists in

nearly every home in the United States

it's produced by electrical wiring

appliances such as microwave ovens and

even electric razors but the

electromagnetic radiation from a

substation is constant and the residents

weren't convinced that their

neighborhood was safe the residents of

meadow Street wanted answers about the

high number of brain tumors on their

small Street and they wanted the word

from Town Hall if the electric

substation might be the cause they

gathered at a public meeting anxious to

hear what health officials had to say

and what they heard

they couldn't accept even though there

were five brain tumors on a street with

only nine homes they said since the

tumors were different they didn't

qualify as a cancer cluster two of them

were benign so-called tumors and those

were meningeal Mo's that have many known

risk factors or associations and

electric and magnetic fields it's not

one of them but one of the brain tumor

cases the one discovered in Melissa

Bullock has been linked to

electromagnetic fields I defy any one of

them to change places with those people

our ministry and bringing their family

there and I'll guarantee and not one of

them would do that researchers have

found modestly higher rates of cancer

including leukemia and brain cancer

among workers who are exposed to

electromagnetic fields in their jobs one

study found that welders have

significantly higher rates of cancer

because of their exposure to radiation

that's been that's extremely good

epidemiology done and in fact there's

more epidemiology epidemiological

evidence for the relationship between

cancer and magnetic fields today than

there was when we accepted the

relationship between asbestos and cancer

back in 1949 but other studies have been

inconclusive one reason why this is a

controversial area and why many

scientists have refused to accept the

epidemiological evidence is because

there is no obvious biological mechanism

whereby magnetic fields can cause cancer

there is some evidence to suggest that

it's not the level of electromagnetic

radiation one is exposed to but the

number of times an individual passes

through the fields people are exposed

intermittently they go in and out of

fields for different lengths of time and

laboratory data has shown that these

kinds can have a synergistic effect but

the fact is that until we understand how

these things affect cells we're just not

going to know scientists may be getting

closer to understanding a possible link

between magnetic fields and cancer dr.

Goodman has been studying the effects of

electromagnetic fields for more than 15

years at Columbia University we don't

know whether electromagnetic fields

cause cancer the most likely thing that

they do is that they

promote cancer that is if if the cell or

the body is in contact with some

environmental toxin and they are also

getting some kind of young field these

two things together could cause cancer

and this has been shown in animal

studies the residents of meadow Street

found themselves in a difficult

situation local health officials never

said magnetic fields didn't cause cancer

all they can say is it hasn't been

proven our conclusions as Department of

Public Health were that we didn't see a

cluster of cases that could be

identified as from a common cause but by

the other same token we couldn't say

that they couldn't be related to

electromagnetic fields or the electrical

substation it's my personal belief that

when a biological mechanism is

established that there will be a very

rapid conversion of the doubters of this

effect right now this is a controversial

area I think that in five years we'll

know what this is all about I'm very

hopeful but the scientists opinions

don't mean much to someone like Jack

Walton a man whose family and friends

were ravaged by cancer he already has

his answer in my opinion I do believe

the electromagnetic fields low-level

raishin radiation has a lot to do with

it there was a lot of illnesses on this

particular Street and the surrounding

streets and when there are five brain

tumors on a street with only nine homes

it's difficult for residents to accept

that it's merely a coincidence I felt as

though there's too much that the average

public doesn't know and I wanted to get

that word out that there there was

possibly an animal out there it was

k*lling them and their kids and their

family I don't feel it's a natural thing

for the cases as many homes as it was

and I never will feel as though it's a

natural thing two cities to cancer sites

and two unsolved medical mysteries

public health officials can offer few

answers for the residents of meadow

Street and Maryvale Arizona

and with the lack of definitive

information the result is usually fear

and anger over the past 22 years the CDC

has investigated over 108 cancer

clusters throughout the United States

and around the world it's the premier

medical investigative agency in the

world and it has never been able to find

the cause for a single cancer cluster

not one