ExposureBlog

Back in 1979, while with OSHA, I received a phone call from a medical student.  His neighbor, who worked at a nearby petrochemical facility in Texas City, TX, had been diagnosed with a brain tumor.  Against all odds, this neighbor worked in the very same facility where another tumor case had appeared almost twenty years earlier.  I investigated, and soon turned up four cases—all at the same facility.  We called in the epidemiology team from the national office and before long, we had identified 10 cases.  Worse, we found the possibility of 18 more cases at another facility about 40 miles south of the original cases.  Unfortunately, the 18 suspect cases was at Dow—and Dow didn’t consider 18 cases much of a problem.  When Industrial Hygienist Dave Elskamp and I visited Dow to open an inspection there, we were shown the door. 

Then our troubles promptly continued.  Pro-OSHA Jimmy Carter was out, Ronald Reagan was in, and the new OSHA boss, a Florida contractor named Thorne Auchter, didn’t seem to like OSHA.  Not long after our Dow visit, we received word that no further epidemiological work was to be done on this case.  Seeing some pretty obvious writing on the wall, the principal investigators got together, wrote up a paper and sent it off to a new medical journal for consideration.  The paper was published by the American Journal of Industrial Medicine, —just as the new OSHA Director terminated the study—and two years later, terminated the OSHA office where the study had originated.

Eventually, a researcher at the University of Texas School of Public Health continued work on the case via a string of National Cancer Institute grants that eventually totalled about $700,000 over nine years.  Despite the massive amount of money poured into that study, no final report has ever surfaced.

I’ve heard of other possible brain tumor clusters-the 1985 cluster in western Missouri, the 1996 Amaco case in Napierville, IL, the Pratt&Whitney case in North Haven Connecticut,and recently a possible cluster in Ocean City, NJ.

Interestingly, the researcher who took over the OSHA brain tumor study in 1980 was also the principal investigator of a paper discussing what is probably the Amoco case in Napierville.  The findings?

“Although conclusions are limited by the small study population and lack of specific exposure data, these findings were not consistent with an occupational explanation for the observed brain tumor cluster.”

Compare that finding with the statement from Monash University epidemiologist Michael Abramson regarding the Melbourne RMIT cluster:

“To be quite frank, I think it’s an unfortunate coincidence.”

Perhaps.  But when these unfortunate coincidences–stretch from Texas in 1979 through western Missouri, through Napierville, IL, through New Jersey and now, in Melbourne, Australia—well, it would seem that something other than chance might be involved.

Louie Slesin over at Microwave News reports a cluster of 7 people with brain tumors all working in a single building. Very strange.  More later.