A federal agency that investigates hazardous substances has accepted a community petition to investigate possible environmental links to childhood cancers in the Waycross area.
Residents became alarmed this past summer when, within a two-month period, four children in and near Ware County were diagnosed with rare cancers.
Three were diagnosed with rhabdomyosarcoma, a cancer that forms in the body's soft tissues. It produces just 350 new cases each year in the United States, according to the American Cancer Society.
The fourth child has Ewing sarcoma, a type of cancer that occurs most often in and around the bones. It affects roughly one in 1 million Americans each year, although the rate is somewhat higher for children, according to the National Cancer Institute.
Health experts have said the two types of sarcomas have no known environmental causes. Still, the 14,000 or so residents of Waycross — Ware County’s only incorporated community, which sits in the southeast corner of Georgia on the Florida line — can’t help but wonder whether the area’s history of industrial contamination might be a factor.
Now, the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry will try to get some answers. In a Dec. 18 letter to community activist Joan Tibor, the agency said it will conduct an assessment of two industrial sites of concern — the CSX Rail Yard and a long-closed Atlanta Gas Light manufacturing plant.
It is not yet known how long the assessment will take. Tibor said she hopes residents will be allowed to participate in the process.
‘CANCER CLUSTER’?
The Agency for Toxic Substances, based in Atlanta, is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The agency — which evaluates the potential for adverse health effects from exposure to hazardous substances in the environment — works closely with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, also based in Atlanta.
The challenge is determining whether the childhood cancer cases in and near Ware County amount to a “cancer cluster,” which is defined by the CDC as a greater-than-expected number of cancer cases that occur within a group of people in a geographic area over a period of time.
Proving a cancer cluster is difficult, because researchers must confirm that the individual cases are of the same type or derived from the same cause.
The Georgia Department of Public Health has been investigating the Waycross-area cancer situation. But in October it issued a draft report that said Georgia Comprehensive Cancer Registry statistics showed incidences of childhood cancer were below the expected rates for the health district over the past decade.
The only elevated rate was for lymphomas in Ware County, the report said, but those cases were not clustered geographically or in time, and thus did not meet the definition of a cancer cluster.
The draft report also said there has been a recent increase in the number of childhood cancer cases in neighboring Pierce County, but most of those cases are of various types and are not clustered geographically.
CANCER DOMINATES
Tibor said she was “very disappointed’’ by state’s report, and she wasn’t the only one.
State Rep. Jason Spencer, R-Woodbine, whose district includes Ware County, said he is concerned that the Department of Public Health may lack the expertise to identify the pathway of exposure that may be causing the cancers.
“They’ve been conscientious about it so far,’’ said Spencer, who is a physician assistant as well as a legislator.
He said state officials have said there is a high level of birth defects in the Ware County area. “Those things have to be looked at,’’ he said.
Dr. Sharon Savage, chief of the Clinical Genetics Branch of the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics at the NCI, told Georgia Health News recently that “there are no established environmental risk factors for either rhabdomyosarcoma or Ewing’s sarcoma. It is difficult to identify the specific causes of most cancers, but particularly challenging for rare malignancies.”
One problem with establishing direct causation in particular cases is the huge overall incidence of cancer. It is the second-leading cause of death in the United States, according to the CDC. Nationwide, one out of four deaths are due to some type of cancer.
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