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
01x09 - Deadly Neighborhoods
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Documentary that reveals how forensic science is used to solve violent crimes, mysterious accidents, and outbreaks of illness.
Documentary that reveals how forensic science is used to solve violent crimes, mysterious accidents, and outbreaks of illness.