EPA report troubles Ohio cancer cluster families

Asso­ci­ated Press

CLYDE, Ohio — Soil sam­ples show­ing high lev­els of a chem­i­cal believed to increase the risk of cer­tain can­cers were found at a for­mer park in an area of north­ern Ohio where can­cer has sick­ened dozens of chil­dren for more than a decade, accord­ing to envi­ron­men­tal regulators.

The U.S. Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency report on the find­ings, though, doesn’t link the con­t­a­m­i­nants with the can­cer clus­ter that has been under inves­ti­ga­tion by state and fed­eral agen­cies for more than six years. Nearly 40 young peo­ple have been diag­nosed with can­cer since the mid-1990s in the area.

The odds are against com­ing up with an answer, even with this recent find­ing, because pin­point­ing the cause of a can­cer clus­ter rarely happens.

Envi­ron­men­tal reg­u­la­tors began test­ing for con­t­a­m­i­na­tion in the Clyde area between Cleve­land and Toledo ear­lier this year. State agen­cies already had con­ducted a vari­ety of tests, includ­ing air and ground­wa­ter sam­pling and radi­a­tion checks at homes and schools.

The EPA found that soil sam­ples taken in June near a bas­ket­ball court showed met­als and PCBs, or poly­chlo­ri­nated biphenyls, in amounts exceed­ing what the EPA con­sid­ers safe levels.

The park in the vil­lage of Green Springs was built in the 1950s by Whirlpool Corp., which has a wash­ing machine fac­tory in Clyde. The park closed about five years ago.

A tip left on a hot­line indi­cated the com­pany used a black sludge-like mate­r­ial to fill in the area near the bas­ket­ball court, the EPA report said.

Whirlpool said in a state­ment that the cur­rent prop­erty owner has turned down requests for addi­tional test­ing. “We are pre­pared to move for­ward imme­di­ately with the first steps of the eval­u­a­tion once granted access to the prop­erty,” the com­pany said.

Fam­i­lies whose chil­dren were among those diag­nosed with brain tumors, leukemia, lym­phoma and other forms of can­cer said they were trou­bled by the report.

“Obvi­ously it is upset­ting to learn that such sig­nif­i­cant amounts of poi­son sludge are dumped any­where, but to either dump it in prox­im­ity or cover it over with a children’s park and a swim­ming pool filled with water com­ing from the very spot where the dump­ing occurred, is an out­rage,” said Alan Mortensen, an attor­ney work­ing with some of the families.

Inves­ti­ga­tors over the past years have been focus­ing on a 12-mile-wide cir­cle of mostly farm­land just south of Lake Erie.

Many of the diag­noses came between 2002 and 2006, lead­ing state health author­i­ties to declare it a can­cer clus­ter because the num­ber and type of diag­noses exceeded what would be expected.

Posted by AP News on Nov 14 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.