Not everyone cheered when Dr. Richard Weisler arrived in Salisbury last month. Despite a recent national magazine spread celebrating his quest to find the root of cancer cases in his hometown, some of his toughest critics were residents of his old neighborhood.

Dr. Neil Patel, a lung specialist, buttonholed Weisler before a public meeting. Patel accused the Raleigh psychiatrist of spreading false fears about pollution and illness in his town.

"We do not need fear-mongering from you," said Patel, a resident of the Milford Hills neighborhood where Weisler's mother lived for 40 years. "When you go into any scientific study knowing what you want to prove, that's poor science."

Such jabs have hit Weisler for years, but he presses on. After his mother was diagnosed with lung cancer seven years ago, he suspected that a smelly industrial district nearby might have made her and others sick. At first, officials praised him for shining light on a potential hazard.

But after collecting data on the dead and ailing, Weisler started warning of local cancer clusters, even suspicious suicide rates. That won him fewer fans.

Linking disease to pollution is tricky, because so many factors could be to blame. Exposures to known health risks -- heredity, diet, smoking, age -- must either be ruled out or documented.

Still, evidence in Salisbury can appear tantalizing. The latest study, conducted by a federal agency petitioned by Weisler, found brain cancer and lymphoma in two Salisbury neighborhoods at rates five and six times higher than the rest of Rowan County.

For Weisler, that was proof enough of a hazard in Salisbury. Now he is urging the state to conduct more studies to understand how it happened and how to fix it.

"If you don't try to understand this, you don't learn how to prevent it in other places," said Weisler, who has filed a wrongful death lawsuit for his mother's estate against the owners of an asphalt plant situated near his mother's home.

But state and county health and environmental officials see no crisis. Individual health histories or random chance can explain elevated cancer rates, they say. Multiple environmental tests have convinced them that no risky levels of poisons are escaping the industrial spots near Milford Hills.

One-time allies wonder if Weisler's campaign is beginning to do more harm than good.

"It can become a negative when it creates undue fear," Mayor Susan Kluttz said.

Cancer hits home

Weisler started his Salisbury campaign after his ailing mother took him on a walk around the leafy Milford Hills neighborhood in 2000. Diagnosed with lung cancer at age 72, Rita Weisler had not smoked in more than 30 years, her son said.

The widowed owner of a successful beer distribution company pointed to house after house where neighbors had cancer. She suspected that a nearby liquid asphalt storage and distribution operation and an adjacent asphalt mixing outfit were to blame. One plant stores and distributes hot liquid asphalt, a derivative of crude oil. The second mixes liquid asphalt with sand and rocks to make paving materials.

Weisler, now 55, didn't buy his mother's suspicions at first. But as she grew too weak to walk, he started sorting her papers and found a letter from state regulators describing toxic air emissions at one asphalt plant, he said. Another time, on a day when the fumes were especially strong in Milford Hills, he saw a child's asthma flare. Later, he learned the state Department of Transportation had paid to unhook a neighbor from a contaminated well in 1993.

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