New study may help shed light on cancer

By Doug Abrahms
Gannett News Service

WASHINGTON — Montana men have a 40 percent higher rate of esophageal cancer than the national average.

Those are among the findings in the first national study of the rates of 24 types of cancer that was quietly released last month by the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Despite omitting 13 states, the CDC report is one of the first attempts to set national benchmarks for cancer rates and make it easy to compare state statistics. Cancer data from the 13 states left off the list didn't meet CDC benchmarks, but could be included in future reports.

Earlier studies comparing cancer rates with geography showed lifestyle links. For example, studies in the 1980s showed Southern white women had a much higher rate of cancer of the mouth, which experts pinned on chewing tobacco, said Dr. Philip Landrigan, who heads the Center for Children's Health and the Environment at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.

"That's the whole purpose of disease tracking," he said. "I think this kind of thing is very important."

The next step is looking at environmental factors that may be causing higher cancer rates, including polluted air or water. Cancer can be caused by a wide range of factors: genetics, lifestyle choices such as smoking, or exposure to chemicals.

But people in places such as Suffolk County, N.Y.; Prairie Grove, Ark.; Fairfield, Maine; and Mapleton, Utah, are concerned by what they consider unexplained high rates of cancer.

Six Mapleton, Utah, residents living within a half-mile radius of an explosives plant owned by Ensign-Bickford Industries had leukemia, and they blamed the release of the chemical RDX into the water system. But Utah had unreliable cancer statistics, making it difficult to compare Mapleton's rate of leukemia with the rest of the state, said Laurie Ashton, an attorney for the six residents.

The company, without admitting wrongdoing, settled in March for an undisclosed amount.

"The goal is to have good data to fix the problem of what caused (the cancer)," Ashton said. "The problems don't get fixed if you don't have the data."

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said the CDC's report is a good start, but the agency needs to go much further.

"Were going to push this hard," Reid said.

Reid and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., offered a bill in March to give the CDC $1 billion over five years to build this type of database, and he plans to reintroduce the bill again early next year. Reid has been pushing for this type of data because 16 children in the small town of Fallon, Nev., have been diagnosed with leukemia since 1997, and experts are still searching for the cause.

Fallon is the first cancer cluster investigation conducted by the CDC in 20 years, Reid said.

"We are going to force them to develop a tracking system for these (cancer clusters)," Reid said.

Even without substantially more money, the CDC plans to update its study every year and add more data, including information about children, said Dr. Phyllis Wingo in the CDC's cancer prevention and control program. More states will be added as they bring their state cancer registries up to CDC standard, she said.

"Our goal was to put the rates out in front of the public to look at the occurrence of disease in these geographic areas to have a baseline," Wingo said. "I think we're on the right track in being able to evaluate those clusters."

But Landrigan worries that because of state and federal budget constraints and a focus on the war on terrorism, a comprehensive disease tracking system will still be a ways off.