A Washington County legislator said he will pursue state and federal funding to study the cause of rare childhood cancers, all in the wake of a Post-Gazette report noting six cases of Ewing sarcoma in the Canon-McMillan School District over the past decade, and 10 current cases of other cancers among school-age and preschool children in the district.
State Rep. Tim O’Neal, R-South Strabane, said he also will ask the Pennsylvania Department of Health to hold a public meeting in the school district to explain its Tuesday findings that the Ewing sarcoma cases do not constitute a cancer cluster. That analysis, however, included only three of the six confirmed cases.
“The report released Tuesday raises a lot of questions,” Mr. O’Neal said in a statement. “I encourage the department to hold a public meeting so concerns surrounding the findings can be addressed. The department cut off its studies with data through the end of 2017. At least two recent cases were not included in the review. A followup study 2018 data is needed.”
More specifically, Mitchell Barton, 21, of North Strabane, who was diagnosed Dec. 27, 2018, and David Cobb, 38, of Cecil Township, diagnosed June 26, 2018, were not included in the cluster analysis. The Health Department explained it hasn’t yet received 2018 cancer totals.
It’s less clear why Kyle Deliere, 27, a lifelong Cecil Township resident who died of Ewing sarcoma on Nov. 15, 2013, was excluded.
The Health Department said Deliere was a resident of Belle Vernon, Westmoreland County, at the time of diagnosis.
But his father, Tanny Deliere of Cecil, said Wednesday he was living with his new wife on a temporary basis in Belle Vernon when his son Kyle, still living in his Cecil home, was diagnosed on Oct. 30, 2011.
“He got sick while living in Cecil. After his diagnosis I brought him home [to Belle Vernon],” Mr. Deliere said. “The statistics should be that he grew up in Cecil and temporarily was living in Belle Vernon after the diagnosis and while undergoing treatment.”
Mr. O’Neal held an invitation-only meeting Wednesday in the Canonsburg Borough Building to discuss the Canon-McMillan cancer problem with elected officials and representatives from UPMC, the state Department of Environmental Protection and the U.S. Department of Energy, with a focus on whether environmental exposures could be a cause.
Concerns include a Department of Energy uranium mill tailings disposal site in North Strabane, a former hazardous chemical plant in Cecil Township and shale gas drilling and fracking throughout the school district and Washington County.
Also invited to the meeting were patients with Ewing sarcoma and their families and several parents of the 10 preschoolers and Canon-McMillan students struggling with other cancers. Those cases include two each of osteosarcoma (bone), liver and leukemia, with one case each of rhabdomyosarcoma (muscle), liposarcoma (soft tissue) and neuroblastoma (nerve cell). A teenage girl from Cecil Township died in February from astrocytoma (brain and spinal cord) and a 21-year-old North Strabane resident was diagnosed in early January with leukemia.
Media weren’t allowed in the meeting but participants afterward generally agreed that funding for research and more explanation from the Health Department represented a good first step.
“Doctors explained what they are doing with Ewing sarcoma and answered questions,” said Jared Barton, brother of Mitchell, who’s now undergoing radiation therapy for his Ewing sarcoma. “They said it needs more research, and they are not ruling it out but environmental factors aren’t a direct cause.”
Mr. O’Neal had a similar reaction.
“While the doctors said that there are no known environmental causes of Ewing sarcoma, I am requesting the National Institutes of Health to complete a multi-year, multi-state study of this cancer so that we can gather more data and hopefully find its causes,” he said in a statement. “No parent should have to watch their child suffer from this deadly disease.”
Cancer clusters are a complex and contentious science. The National Cancer Institute says a cluster refers to “the occurrence of a greater than expected number of cases among a group of people in a defined geographic area over a specific time period.”
Still, “findings are extremely rare.”
“A cancer cluster may be suspected when people report that several family members, friends, neighbors, or coworkers have been diagnosed with the same or related types of cancer,” the institute says. “Because cancer is a relatively common disease, cases of cancer can appear to cluster even when there is no connection among them. That is, clusters of cancer can arise by chance.”
Through careful investigation and statistical analysis, some cancer clusters have been shown to be the result of a specific cancer-causing substance in the environment, the institute says, but that, too, is a rare occurrence.
“One review of 576 cancer cluster investigations conducted over 20 years found that for only 72 of the apparent clusters could an increase in cancer rate be confirmed. Only three of the 72 clusters could be linked to a possible exposure, and in just one case was a clear cause identified.”
So, without a known cause of Ewing sarcoma, a cluster, for now, could not be confirmed.
David Templeton: dtempleton@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1578. Twitter: @templetoons.
First Published: April 24, 2019, 10:20 p.m.