WASHINGTON -- Two North Carolina communities will be among the so-called "cancer clusters" highlighted today in Senate testimony on the environment.
The Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group in Washington, 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.
The environmental group wants to step up the federal response to investigating suspected clusters of cancer, birth defects and other illnesses. In its testimony before a Senate panel today, the NRDC is expected to report that it has identified 42 such sites in 13 states.
The NRDC, working with the National Disease Clusters Alliance, says it found the clusters of disease - either confirmed or under active investigation - in North Carolina, Texas, California, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida, Ohio, Delaware, Louisiana, Montana, Tennessee, Missouri and Arkansas. The groups plan to look at all 50 states.
In only one of the 42 clusters - in Libby, Mont. - was a specific source of chemical contamination identified: asbestos. But the group notes that in many communities, such as Camp Lejeune, "the case grows stronger that documented exposure to toxics has harmed the health of community residents."
NRDC representatives will testify before the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, along with environmental activist Erin Brockovich and Trevor Schaefer, a 21-year-old survivor of brain cancer from Boise, Idaho. He and his family have created Trevor's Trek Foundation to fight childhood cancer.
Committee chairwoman Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and Idaho Sen. Mike Crapo - the top Republican on the Superfund, Toxics and Environmental Health subcommittee - are co-sponsoring legislation aimed at helping communities determine whether there's a link between elevated levels of illness and contaminants in the environment.
The NRDC, which surveyed the 13 states to determine the scope of complaints, backs the bill and said it hopes the hearing will draw attention to communities like those in North Carolina.
"Each of these communities is suffering alone, and that doesn't need to be," said Gina Solomon, a medical doctor and senior scientist with the NRDC. "The science could be more powerful if there was a study looking more broadly at disease clusters."
Well water at Lejeune
At Camp Lejeune, the public well system was contaminated with a variety of chemicals - including benzene, trichloroethylene, tetrachloroethylene and vinyl chloride - 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 has 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.
"This cluster is an extremely important one," Solomon said. "I've practiced medicine for 20 years, and I've never seen a case of male breast cancer; it's an extremely rare disease. There's something going on there."
River water in Bynum
In Bynum, a small community in Chatham County, scientists at Johns 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.
Solomon said the group found clusters, either confirmed or under active investigation, of diseases ranging from childhood cancer, birth defects and neurological diseases to multiple sclerosis.
Boxer and Crapo's legislation would give the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency a role in investigating clusters, create guidelines for prioritizing and investigating disease clusters and increase assistance to cluster communities.
"Whenever there is an unusual increase in disease within in a community, those families deserve to know that the federal government's top scientists and experts are accessible and available to help, especially when the health and safety of children are at risk," Boxer said in January when she introduced the legislation.
But the bill may face a tough climb in Congress with resources tight and Republicans showing interest in scaling back the EPA's existing authority.
Causes of illness clusters can be difficult to pinpoint given the use of chemicals in everyday life, and critics note that some clusters may be statistical flukes. But environmentalists say the investigations have been spotty. Solomon said the legislation is aimed at finding answers, not pointing fingers.
