Washington -- A series of cancer cases related to two North Carolina communities will be among the so-called “cancer clusters” highlighted Tuesday in Senate testimony on the environment.
The Natural Resources Defense Council has included suspected cancer clusters in the small Chatham County town of Bynum, and at Camp Lejeune, in its research on the potential impact of toxic chemicals on human health.
At Camp Lejeune, the public well system was contaminated with a variety of chemicals from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s, when wells were shuttered by the military.
More than 60 men who are Marine veterans or family members of Marines have been diagnosed with male breast cancer. The local community also reported a strong incidence of birth defects.
Federal scientists at the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry are developing water modeling and human morbidity studies on the Camp Lejeune contamination.
In Bynum, a small community Chatham County, scientists at John Hopkins University found a “disproportionately high death rate due to cancer associated with organic contaminants in their drinking water,” according to the NRDC report.
The report said that from 1947 to 1976, about two-thirds of the residents drank untreated water from the Haw River. The community sits downstream from several industrial and agricultural contamination sources.
The Senate’s Environmental and Public Works Committee is holding a hearing Tuesday on a bill by U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, and U.S. Sen. Mike Crapo, an Idaho Republican, to improve testing and reporting on suspected cancer clusters. Among those expected to testify is NRDC senior scientist Gina Solomon, and environmental activist Erin Brockovich.
