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.
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
> "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.
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.
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)
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.
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).
>> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] rcurry|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dbt00|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TeeMassive|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] TheCondor|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eurasiantiger|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] theknocker|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] odysseus|3 years ago|reply
“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.”
[+] [-] slavik81|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rcurry|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matheusmoreira|3 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] natmaka|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omarhaneef|3 years ago|reply
Propublica performed a great public service by putting together this cancer map:
https://projects.propublica.org/toxmap/
It pinpoints elevated cancer hotspots.
[+] [-] refurb|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] NaturalPhallacy|3 years ago|reply
The movie dark waters (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dq0NmehbOG0) is about the town I grew up in.
[+] [-] krn|3 years ago|reply
> "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
[+] [-] sokoloff|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] js2|3 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] aetimmes|3 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] rozzie|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] formerkrogemp|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] graaben|3 years ago|reply
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sudden-death-whats-in-the_n_1...
[+] [-] elromulous|3 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] aaomidi|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adamredwoods|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] extheat|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cookrn|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scythe|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xxxtentachyon|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aaaaaaaaaaab|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tlb|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colinchartier|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] londons_explore|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ohyoutravel|3 years ago|reply
https://www.epa.gov/superfund/search-superfund-sites-where-y...
[+] [-] gruez|3 years ago|reply
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/91/Superfun...
[+] [-] pram|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DoreenMichele|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dzhiurgis|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] treeman79|3 years ago|reply
Good luck finding a lawyer for that. No one will touch it.
[+] [-] heavyset_go|3 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.njspotlightnews.org/2022/04/cancer-cluster-brain...
[+] [-] aluminussoma|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pikma|3 years ago|reply
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."
[+] [-] 2ICofafireteam|3 years ago|reply
Nothing to back it up.
[+] [-] ricardobeat|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LinuxBender|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anthonyu|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] op00to|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adamredwoods|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gatsky|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bilalq|3 years ago|reply
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.